Chapter 28
As Evan is catapulted off the tug and hits the water headfirst, he doesn’t know up from down. He sees only darkness.
He kicks his feet. But his steel-toed boots drag him down. Struggling to remove them, he grasps fruitlessly at the laces.
Why didn’t his life jacket inflate?
His chest screams for air and his pulse pounds in his ears.
More grey water.
Images are flashing behind his eyes: Annie at eleven years old, offering him a slimy sea slug from the palm of her hand. Isaac’s
impatient grumble as Evan stands next to the pickup, covered in sand, streaks of mud on his flushed cheeks. Annie’s laugh
ringing out in a meadow of orange butterflies. His hands wrapped around the trunk of a cedar, a fallen giant.
He’s blacking out.
He inhales seawater.
Walker shifts the tug into neutral, pulls off his boots and Aiden’s rain slicker before diving off the edge of the tug. He
can hear Evan’s swift descent under the surface. His life jacket has not inflated.
He is sinking.
Walker’s dive is exact and fast. He knows the precise trajectory required and grabs Evan under the armpits, hauling him up to the surface, where he is hit in the face by a wave of water.
Evan coughs, then takes an enormous breath of air.
Walker swims him to the stern of the idling tug, close enough for Evan to grab on to the ladder and pull himself aboard with
shaking arms. As Walker reaches for the ladder, the waves pound harder against the broadside of the hull, pushing the tug
further toward a kelp-choked part of the channel.
In the next swell, Walker is swept into an angle that puts him, for an instant, between the granite cliffs and the tug itself.
With the strength of the next wave, the tug scrapes the wall.
It throws Walker against the rock.
He blacks out with the impact.
Evan is soaked. He curls over and vomits seawater. When he’s finally able to stand, he can’t see Walker anywhere. He scans
the surface over and over. The tug scrapes against the cliffs again, knocking him off his feet. The right side of his body
slams onto the deck.
He drags himself back up, his vision blurring, his right eye swelling already. The white of Walker’s shirt appears under the
water; a flash. His limp body floating face-down. And then it’s gone.
Evan tries to think. The tug might sink if he doesn’t pump water. He might drown going into that rough water again. But he
must try. He can’t leave Walker.
Peeling off his useless life jacket, he tries to shed his clothes and boots, but his shirt clings and his drenched socks seem
suctioned in place. His jeans will not budge from his ankles. His fingers are numb, and it takes all his effort to wrench
them off.
When he dives back in through the whitecaps, it’s a curtain of darkness. Kelp clutches at his legs.
Nothing.
A wave smacks his face when he’s up at the surface to breathe again.
Then back under the swirl of angry water.
But still, Walker is nowhere.
Evan thrashes over and under the waves, until he can no longer move his hands or see straight.
As if observing himself, out-of-body, he swims back to the tug and climbs out. Dripping and shivering, he wades through the
water on deck, back to the console.
Forcing his blue fingers to push the radio buttons, he makes another call: “Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is tug HL018.” He
scans the GPS and reads out the coordinates: “Fifty-two degrees, two five minutes north. One twenty-seven degrees, two five
minutes west. Approximately twelve nautical miles south of Hale’s Landing.” His voice trembles. His face aches. “Two people,
one overboard. We’re sinking. Over.”
The radio hisses with static. No one replies.
Back on deck, he pumps until every muscle in his body screams. Time falls away as Evan clutches the handle of the pump, his
fingertips white.
For a moment, the clouds part. The moon hangs low and full, a nebulous halo in Evan’s vision. Minutes pass, maybe hours. He’s
lost track. The rain stops gradually. The wind eases.
Walker is certainly dead by now.
Evan starts crumbling around the edges. If he himself hadn’t gone overboard, Walker would be alive.
He tries not to hyperventilate.
Walker sinks deeper. The ocean’s melody encircles his torso, increasing in volume. The sea whispers her instructions into
his bones. Pulled down by his ankles, he is welcomed into a thicket of kelp.
He is not awake; he cannot fight it, sinking until he reaches the bottom.
Walker could not have stopped it if he tried. The sea has her own plans. She was the one to sing the first song and she’s held the story ever since. The timing is hers alone.
There is nothing to do.
Because people can turn into other things, even when they don’t want to.