Chapter 10 #2
They fly through a six-book set of Choose Your Own Adventure stories Ruth picked up from the thrift store. It becomes a daily afternoon affair: variations on popcorn toppings, forts,
and Choose Your Own Adventure. They sleep head to toe, wish on stars out the porthole, draw sea animals on each other’s backs with their fingertips, trying to guess what they are, and wrestle in their pyjamas like puppies in a pile.
Snorting with laughter. One of them holds the other in a headlock, before they tumble across the mattress.
“Time for bed,” Aiden says from the galley.
Evan unwraps his long legs from around Annie’s middle and scoots backward. His pyjamas have smiling penguins and snowflakes
on them.
“I don’t want to hear you whispering all night, either,” Aiden says with a smile.
Every morning, when Evan wakes, the hood of his sweatshirt is gathered around his face, the strings pulled taut and tied under
his chin. He’s a fuzzy bear emerging from hibernation, groggy with sleep lines folded across his cheek.
They eat boxed cereal in the cockpit in the early morning breeze, close, like books tucked together on a library shelf. Annie
calculates the number of days until Evan is due back at school.
Come September, Mara feels the pull to sail south again, and Evan starts third grade.
Annie feels like she’s about to lose a limb. A phantom longing spreads out, thin and everywhere.
“Let’s do it,” Aiden says. He’s talking about pulling anchor, sailing out the channel, following their pathway south. He puts
a pencil between his teeth and lines up extra batteries in the drawer under the helm, double and triple A’s.
“I don’t want to leave,” Annie says.
“You love it down there.” He removes the pencil and ticks a box on his checklist.
“Maybe shorter this time?” she asks. “Can we come back sooner?”
“Grab that box of D’s. I need those ones,” he says.
This pattern will repeat itself: out and back, here and there, north and south.
Over years, the time Annie spends in Hale’s Landing gets shorter: a couple of months in the summer to sell fish and replenish the bank account, do boat repairs and renovations. They soak up time with Ruth. The year Annie turns eleven, Ruth is diagnosed with leukemia.
Ruth explains it to them: “It’s a chronic thing.” She waves it off with her hand. “I’m doing fine. Might need some extra blood
sometimes.”
“She’ll be okay,” Aiden says, but bites his lip the way he does when he’s uncertain. “She’s tough.”
“It’s minor, honey,” Ruth reassures.
But Annie feels only partially relieved.
Evan still sees Annie when he can, but less as they become teenagers. On rare summer weekends, he comes out on Amphitrite. They sleep under the stars, and he talks about things Annie doesn’t understand: his soccer team, high school gossip, underage
drinking. How excited his friends are about the new cell phone tower.
The summer they’re fifteen, they pass a waxy sleeve of saltines back and forth between them, along with a jar of rhubarb jam
and a butter knife. The night is silent except for the waves and the crunch of the crackers. Annie doesn’t know what time
it is, but she knows it’s late. She doesn’t want the night to end. Her mom and dad are asleep below, after strictly instructing
Evan to stay on the settee instead of Annie’s berth this time. The lights are out in Ruth’s cabin on the bluff.
Evan has his first real job running the side winder for Hale Timber, pushing logs around the booming ground.
“Dad expects it,” Evan says. “I mean, he hasn’t said it to me directly.”
“He doesn’t need to.”
“By the way, did I leave my T-shirt here, the Wolfpack one?”
“It must be somewhere,” she says, knowing it’s tucked under her pillow. It smells of him, mulch, and the underbelly of the forest.
“Dad won’t let me do anything else,” he goes on. “It might kill him if I did.”
“Doesn’t he want you to be happy?”
Evan frowns and changes the subject. “Maybe the T-shirt’s in the laundry bag.”
“Let me just check below,” she says.
Annie ducks down the companionway and stalls long enough to make it seem as if she’s looking, before she comes topside with
the T-shirt in her hand.
Evan tries to lure her to shore. The summer they turn sixteen, he’s more persistent. In June, he invites her to every one
of his soccer games. She does not go. In July, he pulls her aside while they drop off fish at Rosie’s.
“Jack’s having a party at his parents’ cabin tonight.” He keeps his voice low. “Up the mountain.”
“How far?”
“I’ll take us in my dad’s truck. We can sleep over and I’ll have you back in the morning.”
“Good one.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’re losing it, Ev. You know I can’t.”
“But you can.”
“Mom would never let me.”
“Is that the real reason?” Evan takes hold of her hand. His hands weren’t that large before, were they?
“You know her.”
“But what do you want?” he asks. His question makes her skin flush. He’s suddenly very close.
Annie wants him to go back to being the kid he used to be, climbing trees and amassing shell collections and sand dollar colonies,
swimming in every bay they came across.
But time is spinning and funnelling out too fast. He’s floating away from her and she doesn’t know how to follow him.
“Annie! Let’s go,” Mara calls from the dinghy. Aiden has already started the outboard.
“I have to get back,” she says, releasing his hand.
Evan visits less as the summer unfolds. On the last day of August, Amphitrite is moored in the channel. Annie presses a pair of binoculars up to her eyes because Evan is on the wharf beside Rosie’s.
He’s not alone.
He’s holding hands with a girl. Their hands are touching, skin against skin. She has a blunt bob and a graceful swan neck.
She’s pretty. They step closer to one another, until their faces are only inches apart. Annie watches them kiss.
She cannot look away. She needs to see how their lips move. Evan’s tongue slides into the girl’s mouth. The sight stabs into
a soft place between Annie’s ribs. She can’t breathe, can’t swallow.
She drops the binoculars and sags over the lifelines. Mara is beside her. How long has she been there?
“Something’s stuck in my throat.” Annie stands back up, her hand clenched around her neck.
“You miss him,” Mara says.
Annie cannot explain. “I need some water.”
“He’s not ours, sweetheart.”
“But he is.”
“He belongs to himself.”
They migrate south and leave Evan behind.
Back on ocean time, Annie sails, fishes, reads her books. Mara has her memorize the rising and setting positions of dozens
of stars. Aiden teaches her calculus. She stands on the prow, hooting as Amphitrite runs wild through the waves. She tracks moon phases, repairs boat parts, rotates watches, swims with sea creatures all day long.
Life surges, undeniable, through the middle of her body.
But when she thinks of Evan, her heart sinks. She misses him so much it’s unreasonable. Often, she pulls Aiden’s ledger out
and checks the calendar in the back, estimating how long until they return to Hale’s. As she ticks the long line of days off
in her head, it pulls her away from ocean time, into a persistent and intoxicating countdown that lives quietly in the back
of her mind.