Chapter 11
Now
“Fishing,” Ruth says to Walker in the kitchen, two days later.
She taps the side of her soft-boiled egg with a spoon and makes a delicate crack in the shell. “Henry needs a deckhand. Get
you out of the house and make yourself useful.”
Annie looks up from her plate. She doesn’t want Walker out of the house. “But Henry’s nearly out of diesel.”
“He’s planning to tow a sailboat down from the shipyard.”
“I’ve never seen him sail.” Annie tries to remove the shell from her egg, but it sticks to the white membrane.
“He used to crab off a Sunfish when we were kids. Five a.m. every Saturday with a brown bag lunch and a thermos.”
“What’s a Sunfish?” Walker asks, scooping his shells into the compost. His appetite is still voracious—-he’s finished five
eggs. He doesn’t use a spoon, doesn’t like the clang of metal against ceramic.
“It’s a little board sailboat . . . only one halyard and one sheet.” Annie stops herself. A vision of Amphitrite clamps around her heart. Small things: the weather-worn planks, and the look of her sails. Confident, unstoppable.
Ruth has a smile on her face. “He used to call her Pegasus. Like a trusty steed.”
Annie tries to shake the memories.
“There’s a boat on the beach,” Walker says.
Ruth nods once. “Henry asked that you show him the ropes, honey.”
“The sailing dinghy?”
“He asked for you,” Ruth says, “but I thought you wouldn’t want to deckhand yourself yet.”
Annie shivers. Her temperature has been out of whack. The idea of being on the water makes her feel even colder. “No.”
Walker moves his stool toward her. His shoulder touches hers, and even through the fabric of his shirt, his heat is a furnace.
“Teach him the basics.” Ruth spoons out the hot, yellow yolk, then gives it a short blow. “Not far from shore, and not too
long.”
“I don’t know what shape that dinghy’s in.” Annie puts her egg down. She’s lost her appetite.
“Go look at it.” Ruth has a way of pushing forward. “Henry thinks it’ll be good for you.”
Annie grimaces.
“I’ll come with you,” Walker says.
“Let her go alone, first,” Ruth says firmly.
Annie stands, takes the tackle box under her left arm and toes into her old running shoes. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“You can,” Walker says, encouraging.
“Report back.” Ruth takes her last bite.
Annie forces herself to push open the screen door, walk out on the bluff, and climb down to the beach. The sun is out.
After the tsunami, they found the sailing dinghy tossed up on the bluff, wrapped in snakes of bulbous seaweed. They lowered it back down to the beach with the pulleys they used to haul Walker up. Now it lies sideways on the high, dry part of the shore. The sail is tightly furled and tied.
Annie lays her hands on the hull and it sends a chill up her arms. She closes her eyes and tries to relax her abdominal muscles,
lower her tight shoulders. Why can’t she unclench? She wants some kind of sign that it’s okay, that even though the ocean
stole everything once, it won’t do it again. Not that she has anything left to give.
Annie doesn’t know how to wrestle herself through this fear. Ruth needs her to inch forward toward something less emotional.
More functional. Annie can tell. She tries to make a silent deal with the boat that nothing terrible will happen—-not if she
stays close to shore, not if she doesn’t lift the sail.
It doesn’t make any deals.
Walker’s on the bluff, at the top of the ladder, waiting for her to decide. Despite the distance between them, and the roll
of the surf, his sound reaches out and reassures her, even when she doesn’t look up.
Henry MacLeod stands at the far corner of the Hale’s shipyard.
It’s high enough to have been spared the full brunt of the tsunami. At least a dozen boats lie dormant here, in cradles, on
their sides, in various states of disrepair. The tarps overtop of them sag with water. Henry runs a hand over his white beard.
He wonders momentarily when he’ll manage to get another haircut and more coffee beans. Or how they’ll fish—-how they’re going
to eat—-without any diesel for the gillnetter.
These are the types of big and mundane things you think about when the world falls apart.
He walks from boat to boat, stomping over sword ferns, running his calloused hands along the hulls. Eventually, he settles
on what he’s come for: two sailboats.
One looks seaworthy—-up on bright yellow stilts in the middle of the yard with the name Galene on the transom. The other one Henry likes, Polaris, is a Dana 24 in a cradle inside the warehouse at the far end of the yard. It needs a lot of work on the dry, but Henry knows
boats.
It was necessity, at first.
Henry and Ruth’s parents, Andy and Lynette MacLeod, moved to Hale’s Landing in the fifties to work the logging camp. Henry
was only nine years old when a log rolled off a Hale Timber skidder and killed Andy instantly. Ruth was four. The company
paid Lynette a small insurance claim.
Lynette stood for one thing after that: Her children would never work for Hale Timber. She started keeping vodka in the freezer
under a hunk of ice. At first, she kept the drinking in check—-only at night, to go to sleep, she said. But by the time Henry
was eleven, grief had woven its way so deep that the fridge was bare aside from vodka and a jug of cranberry juice. Henry
took Ruth to the wharf with him on a Saturday morning and paid the girl behind the counter at the fish shop two dollars for
a day of babysitting. He offered himself up as a deckhand for the fishing boats. He was the youngest deckhand they’d ever
seen.
Henry was a solid worker, reliable, honest, even at age eleven. And deckhanding paid handsomely. He bought his first pickup
truck at the age of sixteen. Later, he paid Ruth’s way through nursing college, because there was no way in hell he was letting
her work on the boats.
Henry often wonders why he stays, why he hasn’t picked up and moved to a stable desk job somewhere on the lower mainland.
But just as the tide ebbs and flows each day, Henry never leaves without returning.
The familiar salt air, the way cedars push their scent into the wind.
And as much as the fishing is hard work, he loves it.
He loves being the one to fix the gauges when they’re finicky, check any loose electrical, tap on the engine with a wrench.
He’s a fixer. And he craves the way a boat rocks in the water.
He can’t remember the last time he slept on land, preferring a berth any day.
Henry may be a gruff man, a quiet man. But he knows a few things: how to take care of the people he loves, how the ocean can
fill us up again when all seems lost. And how to fish. So that’s what he’ll do.
Annie pulls the dinghy through the wreckage toward the shallows, as if her body has agreed to do this before her mind has.
“You get in first,” she instructs Walker, who’s arrived on the beach.
The dinghy bobs innocently on the waves. He tentatively steps one foot in, then the other, shifting his weight left and right,
teetering the boat like he’s learning to surf. After a few more rounds, he sits. As she gets in, Annie wills her brain to
stay quiet and not give her any trouble. They sit across from each other on the two bench seats. She grips the oars tightly
as they shove off and manoeuvre through threads of minnows.
“Let’s only stay a few minutes.” Annie focuses on the metronomic pat of the oars. “And not too far out.”
“But you love this.”
“I loved it.” Past tense. The water—-so serene and flat. It grates on her, how innocent it can seem. She won’t unwrap the
sail. They’ll stay close to shore. She tells herself these things over and over.
“Ruth said you love to swim, too.”
Moon jellyfish float past them. White, frilly things pulsing in the water with tendrils reaching in all directions.
“Mmhm.” She rows harder. “I did.”
He studies her. “She said they had to haul you out of the water when you were little.”
“More or less.”
“You haven’t gone in at all since the tsunami?”
“No.” She needs to do something with her hands, so she reaches under the bench for the tackle box. “I get scared. It makes me think about my parents.” She connects the reel to her rod and starts stringing the line through the eyelets.
“Would they want you to stay away?”
Annie’s shoulders tighten again. Her mom would never abandon the sea. Even in the biggest storms, she was unafraid. “I know
it’s weird. Even now . . . my mom would get me back in the water.”
She ties a fisherman’s knot around the lure. She sets the drag in case she hooks something big, then casts toward the shoreline.
Fish are probably hiding under the trash to avoid the birds. Her line hits the water.
“What’s your mom like?” Walker asks.
Present tense. An image of Mara appears, luminous, in her mind. “She was beautiful. She had the most expressive eyes—-when
she smiled her whole face smiled.”
Annie inhales and holds it. Will she ever see her mom’s face again?
“You have the same hair as her,” he says.
Annie tilts her head up to the sky, all the way back. They do have similar colouring. The same freckles over their noses and
cheeks. The same small, strong bodies. Or they did. Past tense. Which is it?
“I love your hair,” he says.
A flush rises from Annie’s chest, up her neck to her cheeks. The sun feels suddenly hotter, a penetrating, sticky heat. She
wants him to love her hair. This out-of-place person in front of her . . . who is he? Why does she want him to like everything
about her?
“You must wish she was here,” he goes on.
“I miss everything about my parents.”
She misses her dad, his easy laugh. The tide pools with her mom, how she’d sit cross-legged and watch Annie for hours, losing
time and finding everything else.
“Everyone said she was crazy,” Annie goes on. It feels impossible to capture her mother with words. “She never got off the boat. She hadn’t left in years.”
“She needed to stay there,” Walker says. It isn’t a question.
“My mom never explained much,” Annie says. A bigger wave rocks the boat. “It was so frustrating. Like she was living inside
a story no one else knew about.”
“Once upon a time,” Walker says.
Annie meets his eyes. “Once upon a time, what?”
“So many stories on Ruth’s shelves start that way.”
“Only fairy tales do.”
“Once upon a time there was a girl named Annie, who wanted the sea,” Walker says. He still hasn’t put his rod together or
cast his line.
Annie feels a tug on her rod, but reels in nothing. “And we see where that got her.”
“Maybe she’ll explain everything one day.”
“My mother?”
He nods. “And then it’ll make sense.”
“I can’t let myself hope too much.” She jiggles her line. “My heart isn’t that strong.”
“But we don’t know the end of the story yet.”
“This isn’t a fairy tale, Walker.” She holds her hand out to the shore. Everything has crumbled. Isn’t that what he sees?
The world ending? Its bowling pins and stray bicycle seats, overturned milk crates, and broken light bulbs? “This feels like
the end of the story.”
He shakes his head. “What if it’s still the beginning?”
She puts her palm to her forehead to stop the spinning feeling of these reassuring and nonsensical things he says. The idea
that Mara might still be alive blooms up vibrant and dangerous and without her permission—-the thread of hope. Her instinct
is to clamp down on it too, just like her memories of Amphitrite. But Walker’s face is so bright and open and optimistic.
It’s almost too much to bear.
Annie takes his rod in her hands. “Let me show you how to assemble this thing already.”
The spot they pick teems with fish. They snap at anything. After practising a few flicks of the line, Walker catches three
yellow-eyed rockfish in the span of an hour, marvelling at their distinctively black fin tips and the reddish-white stripes
along their bellies. Henry was the one to teach her about ancient rockfish; the oldest ones can live a hundred years. Annie
makes Walker throw two of them back, even though Ruth would smoke them for later. For some reason, it makes her feel better
leaving the ancient fish be.
“Want to try to swim with me, Annie?” he asks, once they’ve rowed back and pulled the dinghy onto the beach.
She hesitates.
He doesn’t insist. He peels off his shirt and jumps in over a wave.
Annie tries to gather her courage, but can’t. Instead, she sits down on the hard sand to gut the fish. She thanks the fish
silently first, the way Henry says to. Then she digs her knife past the red scales into iridescent flesh.
Walker dives under the surface with barely a splash.
She wonders where on earth he learned how to swim like that.