Chapter 10
Before
After the humpback dies on the beach, Mara and Aiden decide to leave Hale’s Landing for a while.
Mara wants—-needs—-to get away from everyone; from the noise of town, from Rosie’s, the fishermen, the loggers. They call
her crazy behind her back, spread rumours that Mara believes she’s made of seawater. She needs the expanse of the open sea.
They’ll sail down the coast toward Baja. She wants the warmer waters, and does not want Annie to do second grade with other kids.
“It’ll be good for us,” Mara says. She strokes Annie’s hair.
“We’ll be away until next spring.” Aiden stacks cans of tuna into the galley cabinet, snug against the boxes of couscous.
“Then we’ll be back.”
It lands with a thud. They’d left Hale’s before, many times, long excursions down the Pacific coastline fishing Chinook. But
this feels different to Annie; a line being traced in permanent ink.
By late October, they’re ready to leave.
It rains hard. They wear Gore-Tex gear and galoshes that squeak as they move over the deck.
Uncle Henry comes in on his gillnetter to see them off.
He reaches his hand down into the sea, touches water, scoops up a handful, then tastes it.
Annie once asked him about this strange gesture; Henry shrugged it off as superstition, something he’s done since he was a kid.
Satisfied in whatever way it satisfies him, he gives Aiden a firm clap on the shoulder and a handshake.
Ruth hugs Annie for a long time and kisses her repeatedly on the cheeks. Annie studies her grandmother’s face up close. She
has bags under her eyes and her cheeks aren’t as flushed as usual. Henry probably tried to reassure her all morning that they’ll
be fine, the way he does. Henry understands this need for the sea. But Ruth doesn’t look reassured at all.
Henry and Ruth wave them off. Annie waves back. The lifelines are cold and wet in her fists.
She didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to Evan.
They’re long past Seattle now. The weather is forgiving, the sea is favouring them. Mara and Aiden swap out between four-hour
watches. Amphitrite’s sails are full in the wind.
Time changes over these weeks at sea, morphing into a continuous river. Sleep is not only at night, sleep is between watches.
Sleep is when the ocean sleeps, calm and smooth.
Annie falls into this new sense of time as the sea’s cycles encode themselves into her.
Mara and Annie lie on the deck and trace stars with their fingertips. They sit silently at the helm, mapping constellations
through the mast spreaders, turning off the GPS, not needing its guidance. Amphitrite is on course.
“It’s call and response,” Mara says, holding her arms open to the sea. Her voice is hoarse from how little she’s spoken since
they left Hale’s. “You can listen with your whole body, Annie.”
Aiden has brought stacks of books for Annie—math and science, folklore, and books in French and Spanish—all lined up on shelves, the pages damp from the salt water and mildew.
Sailboat school, Aiden calls it. The alternative to the bricks-and-mortar school she will never attend.
Finding she understands math effortlessly, Aiden teaches her algebra.
He calls it: the reunion of broken parts, the science of restoring what is missing.
Intense focus comes easy to her. Annie loves sharpening her pencil, working out the equations, the quiet completion of puzzle after puzzle.
Early one morning, Aiden drinks his coffee and turns through a geology book with Annie curled into his side. He stops at a
thin chapter on earthquakes.
“What’s this?” Annie points to a yellow dotted line on the map. It reaches from northern Vancouver Island to California.
“The Cascadia Subduction Zone.” Aiden takes a sip. “It’s a thousand-kilometre fault line right underneath us.”
“An earthquake line?”
He nods. “The place where tectonic plates shift against each other. A suture line in the Earth’s crust.”
Annie considers other suture lines she’s learned about: on the skulls of babies with their pulsing fontanelles. The joinery
in mollusc shells. When Evan cut his thumb, Aiden used a 4-0 suture thread to hold the skin together.
“Do the fish see the fault lines?” Annie asks.
Sunrise peeks through the porthole. Aiden raises his eyes to it. “I don’t know.”
“Do earthquakes happen for a reason?”
Aiden flips to the next page. “Stress builds up along a fault until the whole thing has to shift.”
They only go ashore when they need supplies.
Come San Diego, it’s a new exhaust manifold and some spare rubber hosing. They buy groceries: lima beans, peanut butter to
stockpile. A line of lemons decorates the crook of Aiden’s elbow, a sack of whole wheat flour under his arm. Annie carries
soap and storm candles in her small hands.
It’s amazing how little they need.
But they do need money. They sell albacore tuna they’ve caught to a cash buyer on a boat near La Jolla.
“Off a sailboat, is it?” the buyer says. “With catch this good?” His name is Germain. He has a twangy accent, an unbuttoned
Hawaiian shirt that flaps in the wind.
“Well, it is. Yes.” Aiden nods and takes the wad of cash.
Then they’re on their own again, the wide-open sea for days. They sail further south to warmer water. Finally, they moor off
the coast of Baja.
Annie loves the rose colour of morning. The horizon feels like the edge of the world.
Aiden plays his harmonica for the first time since Hale’s. Mara tolerates it for only a few minutes before diving into the
sea. She and Annie swim on and off the entire day, under a sky that’s clearer and bluer than Hale’s Landing.
Alone in this prolonged way with the ocean, things that should be strange become familiar. A pod of dolphins leaps around
the boat, water shimmering off their backs. A family of sea lions barks and lazes in the sun on the shore.
Underwater, Annie swears she can hear the ocean pulse like her own blood.
Humpback whales visit Amphitrite with their breaches and dives, ellipses of breath that fill up the air. Their melodies linger in her body for hours with
a dreamy homesickness.
Most mornings, the same whale calf noses up to the stern. Today, Annie climbs the swim ladder to reach him and rests her palms
flat against his charcoal skin. He rolls, an enormous black eye peering into the centre of her.
There are a few things Annie misses about Hale’s. Ruth, her sparkling eyes, her collection of books, picking berries in the
bushes behind her cabin. Evan, his escapades, running as fast as she can, following him over the beach. She misses his trees.
But out here there’s a new space around her heart. It can expand; an elastic, untamed joy that fills her up. At the same time, she wonders if the sea is too big, if she might shake loose without a lifeline holding her to the earth.
The following summer, they retrace their passage north.
In Hale’s Channel, finally, they radio ahead to Ruth to say: They’re coming, they’re rounding Jenny Inlet. The familiar shore
and trees anchor Annie back into place.
Evan’s waiting on the dock when they arrive.
Ruth stands to his right, her arm around his shoulder. Her frame is slighter. And she seems even smaller against the height
of the bluff. Her cheekbones are more pronounced. Maybe she’s lost weight? Annie can’t work out exactly what’s different.
But her worry disappears as Evan gallops toward their dinghy. He’s not wearing his usual ball cap. For a minute, as he barrels
down the dock toward them, Annie worries he might be someone else. He’s finished second grade now and he’s at least three
inches taller. His hair is shorter. She’s aware of the boundary between them, a length of eight months, when he was here and
she was there. How to cram that time into words? Does she tell him everything or nothing at all?
But his familiar lopsided smile finds her, with the dimple in his left cheek.
Ruth has reached them, tears in her eyes. She pats them away with the sleeve of her nubby grey cardigan. It’s buttoned up
to her neck; each button is embossed with a bumblebee, wings spread. Her jeans are rolled up at the ankles. Reading glasses
perch on her hair.
Annie launches from the dinghy and into her arms.
“Oh, honey.” Ruth kneels and puts her hands on Annie’s face.
“Can I go on the boat?” Evan asks Ruth.
“Your dad said to let you do what you wanted to do.” She kisses Annie’s head over and over, then ruffles Evan’s curls. “Why
don’t you two go play.”
Annie wants to tell him about the dozens of silver dolphins that skipped across the sea in Baja.
How stars guided them down; how stars can live inside your chest and pull you along.
You can listen with your whole body, just like Mara said.
Does he know? She wants him to feel the warm swells in California, so big they can lift your feet off the sand and wrap you inside them.
Instead, she asks: “Want to play tag?”
It only takes a few hours to fall back into their way together. Time returns to its linear pattern. The two of them strip
to their bathing suits.
“You’re it!” Annie harangues him from the foredeck.
“You have zero chance!” Evan sprints from the stern and reaches for her around the mast.
She dodges him and catapults into the cold sea.
He dives after her. She’s already too deep, so much deeper than he can go. A moment later, she launches up in a spray of salt
water and dunks him under the waves.
He rises back up, hooting with laughter. “How’d you do that!”
“I’ll never tell.” She smirks. “And you’re still it.”
“Can I interest you two in some boat chores?” Aiden leans over the lifeline. “This teak won’t sand itself.”
The summer unrolls this way.
Evan smiles a lot. He eats like he has a hollow leg. For dinner he’ll have an entire fillet of salmon to himself, easily.
And then he’s still hungry.
They make buttered popcorn with rainbow sprinkles and eat it inside elaborate pillow forts they construct in the aft berth.