Chapter 18
The following week is full of wide blue skies, unfurling green, and heat steaming off the sand. Weather so perfect that if
Annie keeps her mind blank and her eyes on the sky, she can pretend her life hasn’t evaporated. Hale’s hasn’t crumbled, and
she isn’t about to be forced to leave it behind.
She meets Galene in Hale’s during an unusually sweltering afternoon while Walker unloads a day’s worth of crabs onto the area cleared by Isaac’s
excavator. Henry is handing them out to a line of familiar faces. It’s enough to feed everyone who needs to be fed and then
some.
Walker smells of sweat and salt; Annie finds it weirdly distracting. He unloads the last crab pots in minutes, as if they’re
light as air.
“Can I show you something?” he says, as he stacks the last pot.
She follows him off the beach, through the huckleberry shrubs and salal, up the hill to the shipyard.
It’s dark and cool in the warehouse. Angled light falls through the grimy two-storey windows. An emerald-green canoe is stowed
in the rafters with a single broken oar beside it. Cobwebs thread over the beams, and faded orange life jackets line the far
wall, straps dangling.
Walker points to a sailboat up on a cradle, the name Polaris printed on the aft. Her black bottom paint is peeling and the hull is stained with algae.
“Isn’t she amazing?” he says, eyes shining.
Annie wanders her perimeter. The keel has a fair amount of damage, but the hull joint looks sound. No cracks. The mast lies
on the concrete floor. The fibreglass looks sturdy enough, but the wood trim is cracked. Rust weeps from the lifelines and
along the terminals. One copper porthole is missing its glass. “Looks pretty wrecked.”
“Henry says I can rebuild it.” Walker digs around the workbench and returns with a metal scraper in one hand and a palm sander
in the other.
Annie puts her hand against the boat. It’s rough but feels good. She has a sudden childhood memory of jumping off Amphitrite into the cold salt water and Evan cannonballing in beside her.
“You know how to repair boats?” She looks at the thing, then toes a cardboard box at her feet, full of metal wires, batteries,
odds and ends.
“I can use parts off the other boats in the yard.” Walker runs the scraper over the bottom and unlatches dried barnacles.
They hardly make a sound as they fall to the floor. Annie hoists herself up an aluminum ladder onto the deck. She pulls against
the lifeline as strands break, releasing powdery rust particles and leaving her fingertips orange.
“Want to look inside?” he asks from below.
She does.
Walker climbs up and unlatches the doors of the companionway. They descend into the dark interior, lit by the portholes and
the large open hatch in the v-berth.
The galley has cherry cabinetry and a stainless-steel sink clogged with sand. On the port side, next to a fold-up dinette,
is a rusty two-burner kerosene stove. The faded fabric on the bench may have been blue once. Everything is coated in dust.
“Come in here.” He crawls into the v-berth and lies sideways on the mattress. On the two shelves in the space above him are a few beat-up magazines and a flashlight, the battery end missing.
Annie hesitates; the space is so small, and Walker’s sound is so close.
“I want to show you what the view would be like.” He points up at the hatch above him. Annie’s ears flush with heat as she
climbs in and lies down a few inches from him.
He rests his head on his elbow and looks at her.
Annie rolls onto her back and stares up at the hatch.
“Do you think you’re ready to sail?” he asks.
She closes her eyes. She can almost feel herself rock out and back like the sea. “Maybe.”
“You started looking at the water again.” His arm brushes her skin. “You know, Annie. You could leave on this thing one day.
Pack it up, sail away. It could be yours.”
“Mine?” She opens her eyes.
He’s quiet, still looking at her.
“What would I do?” She turns to look at him. Since the coast guard’s visit, Walker hasn’t talked about leaving. She doesn’t
think he wants to go, either. “Where would I go?”
“Somewhere else.”
Annie imagines another place, secret, where no one would find her; where time would slow down and space would open up. The
vast ocean could make her feel alive again—-less like a caged animal.
“Your heart’s beating fast,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“I can hear it.”
“What else do you hear?” she whispers.
“Most things.”
Her hands are sweaty. She wipes them against her shirt. This intense proximity is getting hard to contain. The way he can hear her? She feels drunk with it and wants to get even closer. An overpowering urge that scares her.
Annie shimmies out of the berth, across the galley, and back up the companionway. She rests her hands on the helm, relieved
by the cool, solid metal under her fingertips.
She tries to make her brain work again.
Walker arrives beside her in the cockpit.
“We should get home,” she says. “It’s going to rain.”
“I didn’t mean to make you nervous . . . I shouldn’t have gotten so close.” Walker’s voice falters in a way Annie hasn’t heard
before.
“I liked it,” she says, before she can stop herself or think of the ramifications.
His hum stills at the base of her spine. Annie stays where she is, as if the hum might stop if she spoke, if she moved at
all.
“Me, too,” he says.
It thunders on the way home, the air still and thick. The light rain starts and tamps down the dirt. When it’s pouring, they
take shelter under a crab-apple tree near Ruth’s road.
The bark presses into Annie’s back. The branches rub and click in the wind, rain funnels off the leaves. Apples lie on the
ground, holes in some, left by scavenging birds. Even under the tree, she’s soaked through.
Walker sits a few inches away from her. Annie is hyperconscious of the space between them, of the precise gap where their
skin is not touching. Thunder rattles through the sky and beneath them, through the earth. Walker’s sound is strong and close,
a magnetic field. She wants to collect it inside herself. His cheeks are red from the rain and the walk. His wet T-shirt clings
to his broad shoulders. Bluish veins curve in the crook of his elbow and raindrops collect on his arms.
Annie wishes he would touch her again.
But she doesn’t know how to ask for that.
The hard rain knocks more apples off their branches and when it finally eases, they collect armfuls. Later, they roast them
on top of the wood stove. The insides taste like burnt honey.