Chapter 15
Before
Aiden stands at the helm early the next morning.
His fingers trace the carved names on Amphitrite’s wooden helm: Annie, Mara, Aiden. As if the three of them are inside the safety of his palm every time he steers.
After they left Annie ashore with Evan, they sailed through the night, as they typically do. Referencing his chart, they are
forty nautical miles from Hale’s already. In front of him sits his thick, leather-bound ledger, closed with a black string
around the cover. He undoes the string and opens the ledger to the correct page.
He drinks his usual coffee, strong and black. It steams into the morning breeze. Using a felt-tipped pen, he notes in neat
lettering on a dated line that Annie is not aboard.
As he’s done since he was a teenager, methodical and regular, he still tracks everything on his checklists and tables. He
captures the stories of the tides. Turning to his chart again, he checks the bearing and jots down their northerly direction.
They’re making good time. Mara’s soft footsteps come up the companionway. She always makes him turn off the radio. She doesn’t
like the static or the chatter. And she doesn’t like to look at the GPS.
Mara is beside him. She wraps her arm around his waist and rests her cheek against his shoulder. Her warmth transfuses through the knit of his shirt.
She’s always needed this—-affection and closeness, to have as little space between them as possible. He loves this about her.
Even after all these years, Aiden feels the same pull to her that he always has.
Mara runs her fingertips over the words in the ledger. She pauses in the middle of the line about Annie.
“Something’s not right,” she says quietly.
At that same moment in the morning, Annie sits on the tall bluff beside Ruth’s cabin, Evan beside her, their feet dangling
over the rocky ledge of the bluff. The horizon is empty.
Around midnight after the party, Evan had carried her off the boat. After making her drink a tall glass of iced water with
two ibuprofen tablets, he tucked her into her bed, then slept on the couch. Her head had finally stopped spinning around 3:00
a.m. The ferns are now normal ferns again, not ones that breathe.
But the noise didn’t stop, nor her intolerance for it. When she woke up in a cold sweat an hour ago, she got up and changed,
dug a pair of foam earplugs out of Ruth’s bedside table, and dove back into bed. Under the crisp white sheets and thick cotton
comforter, she felt like a sinking ship. She stared at the wall, bunching the blanket around her ears. It didn’t help. The
overhead fan rumbled, the clock ticked loudly on the bedside table, electrical buzzing continued nonstop. Like vertigo, she
felt an awful oscillation inside her. Her legs rocked.
“It’ll pass,” Evan says now. He has not mentioned the earplugs, which she’s still wearing.
“What will?”
“The mushrooms from the wine. The hangover.” He leans one hand back on the granite behind him. “I should never have taken
you there.”
“I think I have sea legs,” Annie says, but she doesn’t know what it is.
It’s not a hangover. It’s quicksand, fast and devouring her, and she can’t crawl out of it.
She tries to imagine where her parents are.
Even now, she can feel the current pulling them along.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she says finally.
She presses her fingers into her temples.
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” he says. “I shouldn’t have left you alone.”
She weighs possible responses: It’s no big deal. It’s all your fault. What was all of that? Do people actually like any of
it?
She goes with: “It’s not your fault.”
He opens his mouth to reply, but they’re interrupted by Ruth, who has a garden hoe in her right hand and a sun hat tied snugly
around her chin. A reassuring pink blooms in her cheeks.
“So?” Her eyebrows are raised.
Annie takes out her earplugs and puts them in her pocket.
“What’s going on with those?” Ruth says.
“Wore them overnight, is all.”
“And still wearing them?”
“The party was loud.” Annie doesn’t elaborate. But the earplugs were helping, muffling the noise, as if she were dunking her
head underwater. She gets to her feet and brushes pine needles off the back of her shorts.
Ruth stands over Evan and taps the top of his head. “You watched out for her?”
“We shouldn’t have gone.” Evan looks guilty. “It’s not worth talking about.”
Annie feels a new flush of shame.
“Well . . . everyone needs to grow up sometime.” Ruth seems to be treading lightly. “Annie can’t stay on Amphitrite forever.”
Annie leans her head onto Ruth’s shoulder, inhaling the clean scent of her laundry soap. “I might have to.”
“Have you been thinking about school, like I asked?” Ruth would like nothing more than to send Annie and Evan off to university in a flurry of pencils, notebooks, and tinned fish.
“Mom wants me to stay. And I’ve never done anything else . . .” Annie trails off. Does she want to do something else? The
sea, fishing, migrating the coast has been the sum total of her experience; everything else feels foreign. But where is her
life going? Her head hurts.
The earth trembles under her feet.
Annie looks at Ruth and Evan, who do not seem to notice anything amiss.
“You need to figure out what you want,” Evan says.
“What about you?” she asks. “Is working at Hale Timber what you want to do with the rest of your life?”
Evan pushes himself up off the granite. “If I can make it better, I should stay. Right?”
A stiff breeze picks up. Another tremor passes through Annie’s feet.
“Did you feel that?” she asks.
“Feel what?” he says.
Ruth looks at the ground.
A low-pitched drone starts up. Annie feels as if she’s tilting over, but when she looks around, nothing is moving. She swears
the land is sliding away, a carpet pulled out from under her.
“Do you feel it now?” Annie asks.
Evan leans over the edge of the bluff and looks down at the sea. He stares for a long time, frozen there, until Annie and
Ruth join him.
Over a halting minute, a long strip of land reveals itself. Sand appears where they’ve never seen sand before. The sea has
pulled away from the shore and the seaweed-covered plain of the channel stretches out bare beneath them.
Annie can’t look away.
Evan takes her hand.
“We have to get higher,” Ruth says, as she grabs them both by the arms.
Mara’s hand tightens around Aiden’s torso.
A gust of wind picks up her braid and spills it over his arm. Aiden runs his fingertips over the greying ends of her hair,
coarse from salt water.
“Something’s not right,” she repeats.
Aiden agrees. He closes the ledger and massages the salt-and-pepper stubble along his jaw. He thinks about the way Annie has
been isolated for so long. Is it right? Mara always thought so.
When they talked about Annie leaving the boat in the past, Mara always said: Not yet, not until she’s older, it will all make
more sense when she’s older. What kind of sense? Mara could never articulate that part.
Should he have been frustrated by her oblique explanations? Aiden has always tolerated this kind of blurriness with Mara.
Tolerates isn’t the right word; maybe embraces is more accurate. He embraces the strange line between what he knows and doesn’t know about Mara, and embraces the sensation
that she lives only partially inside his world—-and partially somewhere else.
But, occasionally, like now, Aiden does wonder about a normal life for Annie: a house, maybe a job that earns her some regular
money. Just because he hadn’t wanted that kind of life in the end doesn’t mean Annie shouldn’t make her own choices. Aiden
puts his hands back on the helm. Mara startles, her fingers tightening around him.
The sea is calm. The sun is out.
But Mara is more and more unsettled. She has goosebumps, the white-blond hair of her arms standing up in the sunlight. Aiden
turns and rubs his hands over her forearms. A chill races up his spine.
She kisses him urgently, pulls at his shirt.
The sea level plummets as a wall of water rises from the west. Aiden is transported away into some sapphire escape, a dark warmth. He can’t—does not want to—open his eyes.
A roar builds that Aiden cannot hear, inside a merging daydream he never wants to leave.
Within minutes, the forty-foot wave overtakes Amphitrite. Aiden’s ledger flies into the water and the sea receives it back, the stories of herself. The ledger drifts into the dark
as the boat capsizes and the mast snaps.
Aiden and Mara are catapulted overboard into the sea’s waiting arms.
Ruth pulls Evan and Annie along, toward the cabin, up the mountain behind, past the squawking chickens in the coop.
“What’s happening?” Annie yells.
“It’s a tsunami!” Ruth yells back. Annie knows what a tsunami is, but only from what Aiden taught her about earthquakes on
Amphitrite. Ruth drags them faster, through the forest and its loamy smell. The eagles screech overhead. Annie’s legs throb. She falls
and puts a deep scrape in her right knee. Blood runs down her shin. Evan takes her hand and helps her up.
She’s unsteady, but Evan keeps hold of her.
They climb to the top of the outcrop.
“Okay.” Ruth is out of breath. They can see Hale’s Landing in the distance. “This should be okay.”
They’re all panting. The rumble in Annie’s legs has stopped, but it’s replaced with a deeper reverberation.
The three of them are paralyzed as they watch the surging water ingest most of Hale’s Landing in galloping waves. A tube of
water consumes the channel. The wharf is sheared off in a single gulp. All the boats are hurtled and pulled under. The waves
pulse, houses collapse, roofs tear off and slide into the white swells.
“People need help.” Evan is ashen and clammy. “I’m going down there.”
Ruth won’t let him. “You sit down. Right this minute.”
They all sit, then stand and sit and pace and sit down again. Repeated surges—-tugging, blue-green ropes of seawater—-keep
everything submerged for what feels like hours. When the ocean finally retreats, she leaves with a growl in her throat.
Annie can’t speak.