Chapter 20
It takes Annie longer than usual to fall asleep that night.
Tossing and turning, she flips onto her front and cradles her head in her forearms. Her thoughts swivel around Evan, his explanations,
what he said about his mom, the way he told her “I love you” so close to her face. But it feels as if he’s choosing something
he hates instead of choosing her. She’s upset with him but also misses him so badly. It’s all coated in a thick worry about
him towing booms solo.
She rolls onto her side and tugs the blanket snugly around her shoulders and ears. The only thing that seems to help right
now is Walker’s sound, lulling her from the next room.
Is his vibration affecting her in ways she can’t understand? When she was seven, Aiden took her through a lesson in snakes
and how they respond to the world. “There’s a delicate bone in the inner ear, which is quite well developed,” Aiden said,
showing her a diagram in a biology textbook. “There’s no external ear, no tympanic membrane. Sounds conduct through bone.”
It had been storming that day. The boat was heeling in the wind; the portholes covered in flecks of seawater. But Aiden’s
voice was calm and unhurried. “Snakes can locate and strike at mice using vibration alone,” he continued, as he flipped the
page. “Makes you wonder what animals do during storms, right? They detect these things long before humans do.”
Annie tries to picture her mother—-was she with them in the galley? No.
Mara had been swimming in the middle of that storm, hadn’t she? Annie has a vague recollection of pulling herself up the companionway,
wanting to get topside to find her.
Before she can remember the full story, Ruth’s screen door creaks. The flashback fades. Annie’s watch on the side table reads
1:08 a.m. She pulls on a hoodie and goes out into the hallway to investigate. The door to Walker’s room is open, the bedcovers
thrown back.
He’s gone.
Back in the kitchen, she grabs a beach towel from the trunk beside the door. Outside, the wind is cool but not cold, blowing
strands of hair into her face. She holds the towel between her knees and ties her hair back.
At the edge of the bluff, she spots him in the distance, a faint silhouette half submerged in the low tide.
She climbs down to the beach and sits in the furrows of sand. He’s swimming again in the middle of the night. Why? His sound
is strong, and it seems to make everything else bearable. How can she face real life on her own if this is the only way she
can manage?
Two black-crowned herons take off from the water and flap out to sea. She wants to be like them—-still following a normal
ritual, their normal pattern, in a place where everything normal has been upended.
When Walker emerges from the water, he doesn’t look surprised to see her.
“It’s the middle of the night,” she says, handing him the towel.
“The water’s lit up, Annie.” He dries himself. “You need to see it. It’s sparkling.” He sits down next to her, his arm against
hers.
“It’s called bioluminescence. Dinoflagellates. My mom would wake me up to see it. We used to stir it up off the bow to watch it shimmer.”
“Come in the water with me?” he asks. “We can swim inside it.”
A lump in her throat. She swallows hard to get rid of it. “I still can’t.”
His voice is light but definitive. “You’ll swim again, Annie.”
“You don’t know that.” Her eyes sting. She’s not going to cry, again, for the second time today. She presses her shirtsleeves
against her eye sockets.
“I promise.” Walker puts his arm around her.
He’s so warm. It feels different from when Evan holds her—-more gentle?—-and his skin vibrates hers, almost. She closes her
eyes and is flooded with vivid images: a whorled shell, a clay shelf thousands of feet deep, swirls of octopus legs, and a
cloud of black ink. Annie opens her eyes, expecting to find herself underwater, but she’s here on the rippled sand.
“Did you feel that?” Walker asks.
Did she just imagine it—-the clarity of that sudden watery vision?
“I closed my eyes and I was in the water.”
“Because the ocean is inside us,” he says.
Annie cocks her head. “You’re always saying things that don’t make sense, Walker.”
He laughs. “Maybe you’re not hearing it the way I’m saying it, yet.”
Yet. As if he’s speaking of something predestined. “Why does it feel like you know the future?”
“Because sometimes I can hear what’s going to happen.” He unwinds himself from her and uses his fingertip to draw a wavy line
through the sand. It looks like a mountain chain. “It shows us where we’re going.” He turns to look into her eyes again. “Where
we’re supposed to go.”
Annie can still feel the buzz of him, even though they’re not touching. “You can hear the future?”
Walker rubs the sand with his hand until it’s smooth and clear again. “Can’t you hear her, too?” he asks.
“I can hear you. I love how you sound . . .” She’s treading into dangerous territory but cannot stop. “I think about you all the time.”
Walker looks at her and pauses.
“Did I do something wrong?” Annie asks.
“Nothing.” Walker shakes his head and a vertical crease forms between his eyebrows. She hasn’t seen it before. “You’re doing
everything right, Annie.” He looks away from her, off to the left, and seems to travel somewhere she cannot follow.
As they walk back to the cabin in the dark—-up the ladder, across the yard, over piles of pine needles, under the ghosts of
the cedar trees—-he reaches for her hand, and she lets him. The forest stays asleep.
He’s quiet again, in that way that he gets. Would it be possible to live without words? Maybe that would be better. She wants
to keep holding his hand, lie in his bed, curl into him and say nothing at all. Stay in the sound.
But when they open the door, Ruth is in the kitchen, sitting over flickering beeswax candles, a frayed polishing rag in her
hand, a dozen spoons laid out across the table.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I didn’t know where you’d gone.”
“I couldn’t sleep either and needed some air,” Annie says. “What are you doing?”
“These were all mixed up in the hutch. I’d been meaning to sort them out.”
“These handles are beautiful.” Walker picks up a heavy serving spoon etched with grapevines.
“They’re hard to polish, is what they are,” Ruth says. “And each one is different. They don’t make a set.”
“My mom collected them,” Annie says.
“I’m going to put them in this divider tray based on size,” Ruth says. “Get them sorted once and for all.”
“Why do they need polish?” Walker asks. This time he picks up a pewter spoon cast in the shape of a conch.
Ruth cocks her head. “Polish is what you do with silver.”
“It’s late,” Annie says.
“That’s like fighting its nature. Polishing its stories away,” Walker goes on. “Don’t you think?”
Ruth shrugs. She takes the pewter spoon out of Walker’s hand. “Yes, it’s late,” she says.
When they’re all back in their own beds, Annie can’t stop replaying Walker’s words: The ocean is inside us. You’ll swim again. He sounded so certain she almost believes it. She sinks into his sound coming from the other room, as deep as she can go,
letting it sing her songs that don’t have words, until she’s asleep again.