Chapter 13
Now
Walker pulls against the oars.
Each stroke takes them further from shore and closer to Galene, the twenty-seven-foot Newport Henry towed from the shipyard.
Annie would be much happier keeping Walker to herself, staying inside the calming bubble he makes, where they roam the beach
at low tide and try to piece his story together.
Ruth’s deep in logistics: “Day twelve and food’s going to get trickier—-”
“We have plenty of food, don’t we?” Annie asks.
“Henry said folks in town don’t want to fish for themselves. They’re worried about bodies. Contamination.”
“Is that true?”
“That’s the last kind of pollution anyone needs to worry about,” Ruth says. “But they won’t listen.”
The ocean is blue and crystalline. It’s hard to distinguish the sea from the sky, as they blur together in matching tones.
“The water isn’t contaminated by that,” Walker says, mid-row.
“In any case,” Ruth says, “I think they’ll take fish from Henry if he has it. They’ve been buying fish from him their entire
lives.”
They’d been buying fish from Annie and her parents, too. Is it childish, the way she’s secluding herself in the cabin, feeling sorry for herself? She thinks of Evan. The ways he is dutiful. Should she be less hard on him? Where is he?
Ruth goes on: “Apparently, the coast guard is still pulling people off Vancouver Island. We have to make do until—-”
“Stop.” Annie holds up her hand.
She does not want to hear Ruth say until they evacuate us or whatever other until Ruth is thinking. Evacuation feels like the end, her previous life sealed off, the matter of her parents resolved. No more
ocean. They’re dead and the story is over.
In Walker’s orbit, the story isn’t finished yet.
“I feel seasick,” Annie lies, stuck in the darkness of an oceanless world.
Ruth narrows her eyes. “You never get seasick.”
“Can we just get this over with?” Annie says as they pull alongside the sailboat.
Walker seems to have tuned out, scanning Galene’s hull and mast. He hops aboard as soon as they tie off. On the foredeck is a cage of crabs, their pincers clicking against
metal wires.
“Hand me that pot over there,” Ruth says to Walker as she climbs aboard.
Annie feels stuck to her seat. “I’ll stay in the dinghy.”
“And the gloves on the table, too,” Ruth adds.
Walker passes the cage and the gloves to Ruth, who hands both down to Annie. “Teach him a thing or two,” she says. What she
means is: Don’t get stuck in the darkness.
Annie puts on the gloves and opens the pot. The taps and clicks grow louder. “You check the shape of their apron.” She points
to a flap on the underside of a crab. “You want the ones with the long pointy aprons, they’re the males. Throw the females
back.” Annie hands Walker a small one over the lifelines.
It lies still in his palm, as if it’s asleep.
“Huh,” she says. “He likes you.”
“Throw back the small ones . . . they’re not ready to eat,” Ruth says.
Walker tosses it into the water.
Henry comes up from below. No pleasantries. The gruffer he is, and the more armour he appears to put on, the fonder Annie
feels of him. She wonders if he’s cried since the tsunami. It seems as if some adult men have forgotten how to, but somewhere
inside Henry must have a well of tears waiting to come out.
“You must be the greenie. Ever deckhanded before, son?” Henry says.
“I have not.” Walker’s voice doesn’t waver.
“Can you swim?”
“Maybe better than me,” Annie answers.
Henry rubs his head. “I don’t have time for liabilities out here, Ruth.”
“He’ll be fine,” Ruth shushes.
“And what about you, little fish?” Henry asks. “Any chance you want to help out this old sea dog?”
She’s tempted. She looks at Galene, bobbing in the tide, as ordinary and reassuring as it is terrifying. Her stomach does somersaults. “Not me,” she says. “Not
yet.”
“I might sink the thing without you.”
Annie can’t help but smile. “You might.”
Henry smirks. “So is that a yes?”
“It’s not a yes.”
Ruth reaches over to hold Annie’s hand.
“Fine, fine.” Henry zips his fishing vest up to the neck. He glances at Walker. “Don’t expect me to make small talk, greenie.
We’ve got people in town to feed.”
Ruth stands at the edge of the bluff on her own once they’re back from Galene.
After all that rain, a cobalt sky stretches before her. She watches the placid water and steadies herself against the trunk of a cedar.
She had wanted to create some distance between Annie and Walker.
Despite her composed demeanour, never faltering in front of Annie, a few things are gnawing at Ruth.
Their situation is precarious. They are alone, in the middle of nowhere, living off the land, smoking fish and peeing in the
outhouse again like fifty years ago. No help has arrived yet. Fall is round the corner, more rain, and the cold that will
certainly come within weeks. But Ruth is self-sufficient, and difficult situations seem to bring the best out in her.
At twenty-five, she’d been working at the nursing station in Hale’s Landing, checking blood pressures and cleaning out chainsaw
gashes. She fell for Paul, a lumberjack from Edmonton. He was charming, charismatic, with dark eyes and a deep laugh. He spent
his off weeks at the wharf, chasing Ruth, collecting wildflowers for her. They would stare at the basket of stars at night,
and he promised her everything.
Until she unexpectedly got pregnant, and he disappeared without a trace, leaving her to learn the hard way how strong she
really was.
The pain is still remarkably fresh. But it was then she made the decision: She could only trust herself. She swallowed the
shame of it all in one hard gulp. She would raise Aiden on her own, with all her ingenuity and grit. He’d always be ready
to take care of himself. For a rare second now, she thinks about herself: that hummingbird of a girl who had preceded this
stoic version. Where is she now?
What haunts Ruth most is the agony of not knowing what happened to Aiden and Mara.
Where was Amphitrite during the tsunami?
Was her son sucked under the black waves?
She never trusted the ocean, even if Henry always has.
She should have fought harder against the sea life Mara demanded.
She should have kept Aiden safer. Whenever Ruth starts to think about it, she has to stop herself. It would be her undoing.
And it’s Annie she’s also worrying about—-she stayed on the beach after they rowed back, and she’s still down there. Far below
on the flat sand, Ruth can see that Annie has taken off her shoes and is standing at the water’s edge. She looks like she
might put her feet in the waves.
Ruth’s heart aches like a muscle she’s overworked.
Walker—-with his eccentric mannerisms, his sparse speech—-for whatever reason is like a balm to Annie. She seems more settled
when she’s with him. He’s an illogical but familiar kind of puzzle, and she has the sensation of history repeating itself.
Ruth never figured Mara out. And she’s unsure if Aiden did, either. Is Aiden dead because he let himself be strung along into
a dangerous life by an unknown woman? Is Ruth putting Annie at risk now, too?
When Mara showed up all those years ago, Aiden latched on to her with a tenacity Ruth couldn’t comprehend. She was unnerved
by Mara’s mystery, by this woman without a backstory. She heard what people said about Mara: In those early days, they called
her crazy. She was almost violent in the hospital; she kept screaming, asking where she was and why she was there. After she
hurt herself trying to climb out a window, they had to restrain her, for her own good.
They never told Annie any of it, especially not the original story of the night Aiden found Mara. She’s too young, they said.
It would only confuse her. Ruth herself was confused. They concocted a story about Mara’s estranged family being off-gridders
in the Aleutians.
“If we tell her the truth now, she’ll have questions I can’t answer,” Mara said.
Did Mara even know the truth? Ruth was never sure and didn’t like their decisions or the secrecy.
When Aiden quit his hospital job and bought Amphitrite, Ruth tallied off all her parenting mistakes, each thing she must have done wrong. Otherwise, why would Aiden be so hasty, impractical, throwing away everything he’d achieved?
It wasn’t that Aiden was unhappy. Henry reminded her of this on repeat: Aiden was happiest on the water. He looked vital.
But she saw no stability, and definitely no future, in their ocean-going existence. When Annie was born, Ruth was worried
about what kind of life her granddaughter would have, sailing around on that boat.
Ruth always hoped that, despite her wild, rootless childhood, Annie might make something of herself—-a life that didn’t depend
on the whims of the sea. But now Ruth sees things unrolling before her: Annie latching on to this shifty boy, who seems to
have come from the sea himself.
She turns again to watch Annie below, taking baby steps toward the water, this girl who only a few weeks before had everything
taken from her.
Maybe the water is more healing than Ruth thinks. Maybe Aiden made the right choices and sacrifices for what he loved most.
After all, things can be taken away in a single beat, no matter how much you prepare, or how much you worry in advance.
Has she focused on the wrong things?
Ruth isn’t sure.
For now, it’s better to keep Walker and Annie apart as much as possible.
The other pressing issue is that Ruth is sliding toward anemia again. She can feel it. She’d been managing for two months
between blood transfusions before the tsunami, ferrying to and from the hospital. Now she feels the tug of fatigue on her
bones, sooner than expected. She’s winded more easily.
But Ruth isn’t about to leave Annie alone in all this uncertainty, not yet. She rallies herself, willing her body to keep
going for a while longer.
Galene is far off in Annie’s peripheral vision, heading steadily toward the open ocean.
Walker’s sound grows quieter. All the noise she’s almost forgotten roils back up, and her ears sear with pain again. Even
the waves crashing are painful, water thundering over rock.
It doesn’t make any sense.
She stands at the edge of the water, her feet heavy as anchors. It’s all so familiar: gulls diving after herring, the sapphire-coloured
mussel shells clinging to the boulders. Piles of driftwood and seaweed. But it’s all too loud. Louder than ever.
She could have said yes to Henry. Forced herself. Maybe then she’d morph back into a version she recognizes; rewind time and
sink into the Annie from weeks ago, before everything hurt so badly. Fill the hours with what she knows how to do: swim, sail,
gut fish. She’s angry at herself for not pulling it together. Everyone else is making themselves useful. Instead, she’s stuck
here like a pile of wet laundry.
Would getting under the water help? It might blunt the sting in her ears, at least. She recalls the exact feeling of waves
hitting her legs, cold and fast, foam curling over her ankles. The fading divide between water and skin.
But now swimming in the sea feels like a betrayal. Is she allowed to love the thing that took her parents?
But maybe they are alive.
Maybe it’s the beginning, and not the ending, like Walker said. He was so sure of it.
Annie kicks off her shoes and steps tentatively toward the water, until the sea touches her toes. She blinks and sees the
tsunami behind her eyelids—-galloping grey water consuming the wharf and suctioning out houses. She exhales as hard as possible,
taking a few more steps.
The cool water encircles her feet.
The sea wants you, too.
The almost imperceptible words enter the cavern of her body. It sounds like Walker’s voice, coming from nowhere and everywhere. Before she can catch hold of the words, they vanish.
She shakes her head and blinks again. She must be imagining things.
Tears run down her cheeks. Not from missing her parents or the fragile hope they’re alive. These tears are for how badly she
wants the water. On land, things close in around her, rigid and demanding and right-now. In the water everything moves. Everything
sings with an effortlessness.
In the way something so good can hurt, standing in the water feels painful. Annie wipes her cheeks. She only gets ankle-deep
in the tide before she turns around.
She goes back to the shore and puts her shoes on.