Chapter 14
Before
After that night together on the outcrop, Annie and Evan are apart, separated by two-thousand kilometres of the Pacific Coast
and ten full months. To Annie, it feels like years.
It’s windy when they sail back into Hale’s Landing, finally, on a sunny afternoon in early July. Annie’s on the lookout. She
hugs the mast with one arm as they buck through the waves toward Rosie’s. Closer, they cross the Hale Timber lot, and she
spots Evan through the binoculars.
He’s on the beach, smiling broadly as he peels off his work coveralls, a deep tan line peeking around his shirt collar. He’s
not alone. Three other teenage boys kick a soccer ball around in the sand, and two girls perch over a cooler of drinks. A
speaker blasts heavy bass through the earth. That same girl is there, the one Evan kissed when he was sixteen. The brunette
bob, the swan neck.
Someone shouts. A burst of laughter. Then Evan’s picking her up—-swan neck—-by the legs, over his shoulder. He launches himself
toward the water. She pounds him on his bare back as he runs into the surf.
Annie’s lungs feel like cement. A gust of wind hits her, but she can’t breathe.
Mara’s gutting another Chinook on the foredeck, her knife pointed at the gills. “How does it feel to be back?” she asks, her
eyes on the shore. A cello solo on the radio picks up in tempo.
“I don’t know.” Annie looks away from Evan and the girl, toward the salmon and its black gums. “We haven’t moored yet.”
Mara cuts into the fish’s silvery side and says, “I never like mooring, either.”
“It’s been forever!” Evan calls from the back of his skiff, early the following morning.
Annie has just woken and come topside. Her sleep was fitful and dreamless. A mist hovers over the water, fogging everything.
Evan ties off and hops aboard. In the cockpit he pulls her into a close embrace, too fast for her to resist him, too fast
to stop, to push him away, to ask what he was doing with that other girl. His voice is in her ear: “Why didn’t you come and
find me yesterday?”
“Annie, want some oatmeal?” Mara interrupts, climbing up the companionway.
“Mara,” Evan says. He takes a step back from Annie. “Welcome back.”
“I thought you’d be at work again,” Mara says.
“Again?”
“We saw you at the timber lot when we sailed in, yesterday.” Mara’s words aren’t as sharp as Annie wants them to be.
“I start in fifteen minutes,” he says.
“I’m not hungry, Mom.”
“Alright. I’ll make us some tea.” The boat rocks as Mara climbs back below.
“When can I see you?” Evan whispers. “There’s a party tonight at Courtney’s cabin on Goose Island.”
“I don’t even know who Courtney is.”
“Come with me. We can catch up—-” He’s interrupted by a ping. Evan pulls a device from the back pocket of his jeans. It’s
foreign to Annie; neither Ruth nor Annie’s parents wanted a cell. Ruth says they’re addictive. Evan swipes, scans a message,
then slides it away. “Sorry,” he murmurs.
Where did he go, just then? He wasn’t with her. “I better stay here,” she says.
“Will you at least think about it?” He squeezes her arm and lets his hand linger there.
“Can you imagine me at a party? Look at me.”
His eyes narrow. “I’m always looking at you.”
“Except when you’re not.”
He straightens. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’d better go now.” She turns. “You’ll be late for work.”
“Annie. Stop.” He reaches around her waist, closer, bringing her back toward him. She’s wanted those hands on her for so many
months. But now a wedge has lodged between them. “What’s this about?”
She can’t bring herself to ask about the girl over his shoulder at the beach. She stares at the deck instead, at the worn
teak under her feet, until he pulls her toward him. Inside his arms, all she feels is his heartbeat, his breath against her
cheek, her face tucked between his jaw and his collarbone.
“Please just think about it. Dad’s away and you can stay at our place after,” he says.
Annie feels butterflies in her stomach at the idea of being alone with him.
“And it would be good practice, to meet some people, right?” he asks.
“Practice?”
Before he can answer, Mara comes back up with a steaming cup in her hands. “Better get going, Evan,” she says. “Your dad will
be wondering where you are.”
By lunchtime, Annie’s been round and round about what to do. She’s always been scared of going ashore, but finally she works up the nerve to ask.
“No,” Mara sighs. “The Chinook are still running. We’re heading back up the channel this afternoon.”
“So soon?”
“She could stay for the party and sleep at Ruth’s tonight,” Aiden says.
Mara gives him a fierce look. “Leave her behind?”
“She’s nineteen, Mar.”
“I don’t want us to be apart.”
“We can’t lock her up here forever. She’s an adult.”
Annie lies flat on the cockpit bench, trying not to listen to the harsh whispering between Aiden and Mara down below.
When they emerge on deck, Aiden stands unusually firm. “You should go, Annie. It’s your life and you need to make your own
decisions.”
Mara sighs.
“It’s normal,” Aiden says. “Past due.”
“But you’re sailing out,” Annie says.
“Ruth’s back on the ferry this afternoon after her transfusion. You can sleep at her place and we’ll be back in a couple days.
It’ll feel like no time.”
Mara opens her mouth to speak again, but says nothing.
The party is down the channel, six kilometres southwest. Annie puts on a fresh T-shirt that she hopes doesn’t smell too much
like fish and ties her hair back in a ponytail. Evan picks her up at Ruth’s jetty in a Hale Timber bowrider.
She sits in the passenger seat and he reaches across to hold her hand briefly.
An insurance commercial plays on the boat radio.
She clicks the knob off and taps her feet as Evan speeds up toward full throttle.
Cool wind hits her cheeks, but the seats are hot and sweaty under her legs.
It’s too windy to talk, the engine revving too loud, and Evan doesn’t slow the pace until they’re well outside of Hale’s.
The waves whoosh and swirl around them. He turns to look at her, all chocolate-brown eyes and unshaven scruff and that mouth
she wishes she didn’t want so badly on her own.
“You’re here,” he says, but somehow it feels like a question. He stops the engine and pulls her over toward him. “Come here.”
She sits in his lap. He puts his hands on her cheeks and pulls her to him until their noses touch.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“I need to kiss you,” he says. “Can I kiss you?”
She doesn’t stop him and doesn’t want to, even though she’s angry. She needs him so badly. His lips find hers, soft and open.
She wants to stop doubting whether they’re okay.
But the vision of brunette-swan-neck swims up. She shivers.
He pulls away an inch. “You’re somewhere else, aren’t you?” he asks. “I felt it this morning.”
Annie can’t hold it in. “Who’s that girl?”
“Which girl?”
“You had her over your shoulder.” She can’t meet his eyes anymore, so she looks out over the water. They bob in the eddies.
“On the beach when we sailed in.”
“That’s what this is about?” His voice is louder than usual.
“I get it. We were away.”
“It’s not what you think,” he says, turning her face back toward his. “It was a stupid dare.”
“You don’t have to explain it.” She doesn’t know why she says that; she does want him to explain. The tide’s flowing in and
they drift backward against the waves. The sky is a bruised violet colour in the setting sun. “I’m fine.”
“Nothing has changed, Annie,” he says. “Let’s talk about this later. They’re expecting us at the party.”
But she’s not sure nothing has changed. The distance between them isn’t the only problem. Everything seems louder since she left Amphitrite. She returns to her seat and Evan starts the engine again. When he finally moors at the Goose Island dock, the noise has
amplified: his jangle of the boat keys, the bump of the hull against the squeaky fenders, the tacky sound as her legs peel
off the leather.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Evan looks concerned as she steps up and out of the boat. He steadies her hand.
“I’m okay.”
“We can go back?”
It doesn’t feel like a real offer, even though she wants it to be.
“I’m good,” she lies again. When was the last time she was this far away from Amphitrite and her parents? Evan tries to keep hold of her hand, but she doesn’t want him to. She straightens her shirt instead, then
follows him down the path to the cabin.
It’s not a cabin at all. It’s an estate: a two-storey home with gabled windows, bright white siding, and slate walkways. Buckets
of ferns hang from thick-beamed awnings. The wrap-around front porch has several sitting areas, each with its own throw pillows
and blankets arranged symmetrically. Music pours from the built-in speakers in the ceilings. The front doormat says Home Sweet Home.
Inside, a dozen or so people mill around, drinks in their hands. The coffee table is laden with bowls of chips, a bottle of
spray-on SPF 50, a mickey of tequila. A couple is making out at the far end of a leather sectional. A blaze roars in the fireplace
off to the left and an air conditioner hums incongruously nearby. Annie is unsettled by the sounds of a fridge door opening
and closing, the clatter of ice dumped into a cooler, the pop of beer cans, voices weaving into a swarm of sound.
Evan introduces her to his friends. She keeps a smile pasted on her face, puts her hands in her pockets, takes them out, tries to look normal, even though she’s not sure what normal is supposed to look like. She tucks her hair behind her ears, then tries not to fidget. She pretends she’s listening.
Evan is pulled by the arm into another circle. Annie ends up alone beside the dining table, with an abandoned bag of Doritos
and lipstick-rimmed glasses of wine.
It’s too much.
She makes her way to the furthest corner and presses her palms over her ears. The noise is scattered and rhythmless and overwhelming.
She needs to cut off the volume but not look ridiculous doing it.
“Seashell wine?” One of the girls is holding out an uncorked bottle and a stemmed glass. Annie thinks her name is Courtney