Chapter 30
Annie pushes herself through hot tears across the boarding plank along with everyone else on the coast guard ferry. Evan waits
with his outstretched palm.
She is the last to board.
Her trembling hand grips the duffle bag that Evan packed. The handles dig into her fingers and its zipper strains; she has
no idea what’s inside. Evan squeezes her hand.
She does not let go of him.
“As soon as we’re there, we’ll go see Ruth at the hospital.” His words are faint and far away.
When the engine starts, Annie panics and grabs her chair, as the water surges under them, rolling and unsteady. She is floating
on an ocean she cannot trust. Never again. The ride is turbulent, the whipping wind, people milling around, their small talk
too loud in the small cabin. The prow of the ferry dips up and down over capricious water. Annie does not look out the windows
and cannot let go of the armrests. She’s sure she is dying.
They make another stop six hours later, only long enough for her to walk two shaky laps around the deck at Evan’s insistence.
She can’t look anywhere but at the floor. Then she’s back in her seat.
Evan keeps watch over her, rarely taking his concerned brown eyes off her.
It takes the whole day to get to Vancouver.
Everyone is loaded onto yellow school buses with squeaking vinyl seats. They drive past the wreckage still on the beach. It’s
minor damage, comparatively. Garbage and mud, yes, but winking cellular antennae are still intact. Buildings are upright,
with roofs still attached. Stores have their lights on through the windows. Recycling bins still wait for pickup at the end
of driveways.
If she thought it was loud without Walker in the cabin or on the beach, she had not yet understood what it could be like in
a city.
This is head-splitting.
“Temporary Housing” is scrawled on a billboard outside a mossy brick building. Weeds choke the entryway and the cracked concrete
steps. The building is drafty. The hallways are windowless, and the walls and furniture are beige. Evan and Annie have rooms
assigned next to each other. A broken toilet down the hall runs continuously, beside a dripping faucet that sounds like a
jackhammer.
Annie heads straight for her room and locks her door—-not just the lock, but also the stainless-steel slide bolt above the
handle—-and refuses to respond to Evan when he knocks. Not so much that she refuses, but she cannot organize a response anymore.
She does not bother to take off her boots before falling into the hard single bed. The wool blanket under her is scratchy
and stiff.
Her skin feels tingly, like it’s falling asleep or not getting enough oxygen. Sparks flare around the edges of her visual
field.
Evan calls her name, knocks again, tries to soothe her from behind the door, tries to reassure her that she’s okay. She is
not okay; in fact, she is certain she will never be okay again. He leaves for a bit, then comes back. Is she wailing? What’s
this noise escaping her mouth? Her pillow is soaked. Her face is covered in what seems like seawater. It tastes of ocean.
Ocean she does not want.
“Annie, you need to try to breathe slower,” Evan says through the door. “Take longer breaths.”
After some unbearably-long-but-probably-short amount of time, Evan’s asking around for a key. “I don’t know what’s happening,
it sounds like she’s having a seizure or something,” she hears him say. “Does anyone have a screwdriver?”
Next, he’s rattling the handle, trying to pry the door open. He calls her name more insistently.
The pillow is still over her head, and her thoughts are looping: Why would Walker leave? Or how could he drown? He took with
him the sound, and the explanations she needed about herself and her mother and the sea. How will she live with so many questions
unanswered? He was such a good swimmer. How could the ocean take him, too? She coasts in and out of an awake-asleep-ness.
She isn’t sure where she is and everything is dark.
“Make sure you’re out of the way of the door, Annie!” Evan shouts.
The ear-shattering sound of a drill going at the door hinges, one after the other. Her pillow is not thick enough, her hands
over her ears not strong enough. The drill bit grinds against the screws, which finally give way. Only the sliding bolt still
holds.
His voice again: “We can do this together. Just open the door.”
She cannot. She waits for the end, for more darkness, for everything to be over.
Evan pounds his body into the door—-once, twice, and a third time—-until the wood yields, cracking and falling inward onto
the beige laminate flooring, landing with a smack.
He’s broken down the door.
And she is broken, too. She’s sure of it.
With Evan now lying on the narrow bed beside her, his hand over her ear, the darkness of night comes.
She barely sleeps, in and out of hallucinations: a large spider under a clear plastic cup. An aquarium of aquamarine seahorses. A whale jawbone dragged through a desert of sand. She holds onto the cord, the three whalebone beads warm against her throat.
Even if she doesn’t want it to, the sun returns. After a long period of Evan rubbing her back, miraculously finding her earplugs,
telling her she will not die and she is not dying, despite how she feels, he manages to pull her from the bed.
They cook scrambled eggs for breakfast in a shared kitchen with a gas burner stove. He has to strike an entire book of matches
before the flame catches. Annie has two bites.
“At least we’re here now,” he says. “We can see Ruth.”
They walk the neighbourhood, following a folded map. St. Paul’s Hospital is a dot within an expansive grid of narrow sidewalks
that smell of rubber and gasoline. This part of Vancouver is completely unaffected by the tsunami—-no crumbling buildings,
groaning bridges, unattended refuse piles. No clanks of generators in the background.
They might as well be on another planet.
Evan is filling the space, talking because she is not. Trying to comfort her, saying things like “it feels like regular life,”
and “maybe we can start fresh,” and “I told Dad I wasn’t coming back.”
Press fast-forward, he seems to be saying. Move on.
The hospital is crowded. In the elevator, Annie feels like a caged animal, its slow ascent, dinging at every level, the in-and-out
of strangers staring at their cell phones.
Ruth is a slip of herself under a thin white blanket on the eighth floor.
“Honey.” She holds Annie’s face.
Henry’s shirt is rumpled and he has bags under his eyes. For days, he has been camping out on a reclining chair next to her
bed. He pats Evan’s shoulder.
Annie can’t help it. She climbs right into Ruth’s bed beside her and underneath the covers.
The days unravel, each a papery replica of the next. Annie cannot keep them in order. It’s late October already. Downed leaves plaster the pavement, releasing their saccharine scent. A pervasive, damp coldness that will not leave.
Evan and Annie are not sure what to do with themselves. Most days, they visit Ruth.
“There are these interest-free loans for university tuition,” Evan says, in front of a computer in the hospital visitors’
lounge. His feet tap out a staccato rhythm. Ruth is having another chest X-ray.
Annie watches Evan’s eyes move across the screen. Tiny clicks of the mouse.
“I’m applying to a new coast guard training program, Annie. They’ve come up with entry exams if you’ve been displaced from
the coast.”
“That’s great,” she responds absently.
“What are you thinking about? You’re someplace else.” Because he can tell with her, of course he can.
“Sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry.” He touches her shoulder and leaves his hand there. “I don’t know how to make this better for
you.”
“That’s not your job.”
“I need to get you back.”
“I’m here.”
“Do you want to go back up north?”
“There’s nothing left for me, Evan.”
“I feel like I’ve lost you.” His voice is soft.
He is not wrong.
Ruth and Henry encourage her to make a plan for herself.
Their enthusiasm carries Annie along like a current.
It’s a blessing; she does not need to think or decide on her own.
Without any school records, she takes entrance exams. In November, she sits at a desk in a university office and flips through a stapled package of multiple-choice questions.
Math problems, basic science, essays to interpret.
Then long-answer questions about her interests, her life, and family.
Tell us what’s unique about your personal background, it asks.
She’s caught up for a moment on how fine the pen tip is, the way it narrows to a point. Her pen stutters across the page in
black ink.
I grew up on a sailboat, she writes. I almost never went ashore.
How can you put it into words? The push and pull of the tides, the way they never falter. Sails that fill up in the wind.
Tracking the sky to stay on course. The massive wave and everything that was taken away.
My dad was a doctor, but my mom loved to sail. We fished, we migrated the coast with stars as a map. Then I lost nearly everything I knew to the sea.
The words she writes are a dried-out skeleton.
“I’ll never get in,” she says afterward.
“You will,” Evan replies.
And he’s right. The standard-issue landline on the wall of Annie’s temporary housing room rings two weeks later, mid-December.
She startles at the trilling sound.
“Hello?” she answers.
A bubbly voice greets her on the other end. “Hello! I’m Lori Schnell from the new accelerated coastal medical school program.
Is this Annie MacLeod?”
“It is.”
“We read your entrance exams,” she says. “We’ve been skimming from the top results. You scored in the ninety-seventh percentile.
We think our program is a good fit for you.”
As Lori’s pace ramps up, Annie only catches bits and pieces. “I’m sorry? Could you please repeat that?”
“. . . Six years for general practice. We should’ve done this ages ago, right? Shortened it like the European model,” she goes on. “The province was short on medical personnel to begin with. Now, look at us . . .”
“You’re saying I got into medical school?”
“We need to backfill. A sustainable plan, you know? I realize it’s a lot to take in.” Lori’s voice is tinny.
Annie agrees to nothing, thanks the woman politely, and hangs up.
“What an incredible opportunity,” Ruth says later, her voice scratchy, a cough deep in her lungs. She’s still on the eighth
floor, still in the same bed. “Just like your dad, honey.”
“Did Dad really like it?”
“He was incredible at it.”
The room is too small, a matchbox penning them in. Annie wants to get Ruth out of here. Is medical school the way to do it?
Besides, her dad had chosen it for good reason. To help people.
What else is she going to do?
Evan helps her through the endless pages of registration forms. He sits beside her until they are done, folded, tucked into
a large, brown envelope; stamped and slid into the mail slot.
It’s only been ten weeks since they arrived in Vancouver. Annie’s been washing and wearing the same clothes: a rotation of
torn jeans, one light grey hoodie, and a few T-shirts and pairs of underwear she retrieved from the top of the bag Evan packed.
But now she stands in front of the duffle and unzips it properly.
Inside she finds an array of her usual clothes and an extra rain jacket that smells like the beach. The laces are still tied
on her running shoes and there’s a ring of crumbly salt around the soles. She pulls out a woollen hat, a plastic bag of extra
hair elastics, then a piece of soft cloth wrapped around five of Mara’s serving spoons, one with a starfish etched onto the
handle, another with a clamshell. Evan must have collected them from the hutch for her. They feel ice-cold in her hands.
The last thing in the bag is a strawberry jam jar. It’s full of water and sand, flecks of seaweed. Evan’s handwriting across a strip of masking tape: Hale’s Landing.
Annie unpacks all the items, arranging them with surgical precision on the melamine shelves of her closet.