Chapter 31
After months of drifting along, Annie has to start school with a sprint.
With prerequisite subjects to complete before September, she buys three-ringed binders, loose-leaf paper, a set of pens, and
stacks her textbooks on the desk in her room. Pages of cell cycles, organic chemistry equations, ethical cases. It all feels
vitally important to memorize.
Annie has an improbable—-almost photographic—-memory for it all. She reads it once and knows it, like everything she learned
so easily in sailboat school. She likes A+ grades and how gruelling the work is, the way it orders her mind when nothing else
in her life computes. She studies late every night, attempts to sleep, does it all again. The rigour is keeping her sane.
Except for when she derails. Today, at the bathroom sink, she’s lost: A soapy trail runs off her forearm and pools on the
floor, and she doesn’t notice until her socks are wet. How long has she been standing here, missing him? Her eyes are filling
again. She shuts the tap off, shakes her whole body like a dog getting rid of water.
“You feeling okay?” Evan asks from her bedroom doorway, after she dried the floor with trembling hands and changed socks and
failed to concentrate on schoolwork again. He’s wearing his new coast guard training uniform.
Annie dog-ears the page and flips her textbook closed. “I don’t think I can get through the rest of this.”
“I have something to show you,” he says. “It might help.”
Three blocks away, Evan leads her into a glass-walled building and pays the admission. They pass through a steel carousel,
walk through separate men’s and women’s change rooms, out onto a sea of faded blue tiles.
A public swimming pool.
The ceiling is full of skylights. A clutch of elderly women swim breaststroke in swimming lanes divided by floating ropes.
The room echoes with splashing sounds. A teenaged lifeguard sits on a lookout at one side of the pool, her elbows leaning
on her knees, a shiny silver whistle around her neck.
“I know you won’t go to the beach,” Evan says as they stand together on deck, “but do you want to try it?”
She does.
Annie leans into him. How does he still smell like home?
She visits the pool a dozen times that month. Each time, she stands on the edge, fully clothed and with shoes on.
The memory of Walker’s sweet sound will not let go.
It is mostly the vacant, middle-of-the-night hours when she cannot rid herself of it. He visits in nearly every dream, carrying
the backdrop of never-ending sea. They are not peaceful dreams, for there are currents she cannot not pass, eddies and whirlpools
and boulders in the way, then silence like a graveyard. Every night the same.
It’s too much.
Annie conjures a cement box in her mind. She imagines every single corner, each crack. She crafts a snug lid to seal it off.
Every time she thinks of that sound, she stops herself. She imagines putting a lid on the box, walking away from it.
She dumps the jam jar of seawater down the toilet.
It’s the only way to inch forward. It’s easier to pretend it never existed. Any of it—not just the spell that Walker seemed to cast, but also her childhood on the sea, a longing for that life that feels so chasmic it makes her weepy. It’s easier to put it behind her, start this new thing.
This new life.
When she finally gets the nerve, she tucks her clothes into a metal locker with a combination lock. She dangles her toe in
the water, before lowering herself into the deep end. The water creeps up her torso, toward her neck.
She freezes.
She needs to get out. Right now. Her mind wrestles back and forth—-yes or no? Go or stay? She must try; she’s here in the
water, and she’s okay so far. Isn’t she? This moment is okay. She wants to try.
“I can do this.” She says it out loud, to make it real. She clings to the edge of the pool, her knuckles white. Closing her
eyes, she takes a hesitant gulp of air and submerges.
It’s been months since she was underwater. A clarity rushes up. Her skin feels alive, like it’s waking from a long nap. She doesn’t have to work to quiet anything. The hushed silence.
She releases her hold on the edge and floats across the narrow swimming lane.
By the end of March, Annie adheres to the rhythm of days like a metronome. If she got offbeat, she’s not sure she could find
the pace again. Each morning, she wakes to the painfully loud beeping and red light of the alarm clock.
Swimming is now the only thing she desires. After the pool, before a crammed day of schoolwork, she visits Ruth. Despite a
brief stint out of hospital and into the temporary housing, she’s been admitted again with another bout of pneumonia.
Today, Ruth is sitting up on the edge of the bed. Her blue eyes are clear and bright. As a child, Annie would look into the
pools of Ruth’s eyes and think she could see the future, as if she were a fortune teller.
“What are you learning this week?” Ruth asks. Her voice does sound stronger, doesn’t it? Annie smiles, relaxing her belly muscles.
“Anatomy.”
“Oh. I loved that. If only we’d brought my Netter Atlas along.” There’s lightness in her voice; she almost seems like her old self.
One year, when Annie was about fifteen, her dad brought Ruth’s anatomy atlas with them when they sailed south. Annie was fascinated
by the nervous system; the way the nerves looked like tree branches, a narrowing infinity of channels, an invisible internal
mapping. She didn’t realize it at the time, but so much of what her dad taught her was related to his medical training.
“You seem better today,” Annie says.
“My vitals are normal. Bloodwork is better.” Ruth coughs lightly. “I’ll be able to come home soon.”
Except it won’t be home. It will be this city, its metallic odour and crosshatch of roads, the dull pallor of concrete.
“I miss being home-home.” Annie’s voice quivers. “Our real home.”
“Maybe you’re thinking too much about it,” Ruth says.
“I’ve tried to stop thinking about it.” Annie’s eyes brim with tears. She shouldn’t start down this road, remembering things.
It’s risky and it only leads to more crying.
“What if you’re supposed to be here?” Ruth straightens the blanket over her lap, then looks into Annie’s eyes. “We’re allowed
to change, Annie.”
A trolley creaks in the hallway. Someone is pulling at the curtain around Ruth’s bed, sweeping it aside.
“One step after another. Focus on small things. You’ll see how strong you are,” Ruth finishes.
Annie wipes away her tears, as an orderly slides a breakfast tray in front of Ruth.
The phone call arrives two mornings later.
It happens at 7:26 a.m. while Annie pages through a physiology chapter on the heart, reading about the first embryonic spark and the beat of its cells.
Chambers constructed from emptiness itself.
A collection of muscles activated in synchrony.
The way the heart continues to pump its circular signals all by itself.
Until it is the end.
The trill of the phone startles her as it does every time. A doctor from the inpatient unit offers flat pleasantries.
And then: “I’m so sorry to let you know that Ruth passed away overnight.”
Annie drops the receiver. She just saw her. Ruth looked well, she looked herself.
The words on the page below her smear into a tidal wave.
They put Ruth’s ashes into the sea.
Henry is the one who does it. He stands in the shallows of low tide and sprinkles them from a grey ceramic urn. Wind presses
against their faces, as a flock of gulls lift off, suspended in the breeze. Annie stares at Henry’s hands, his calloused palms,
his white eyebrows furry like caterpillars. Evan stands sentinel, inches from Annie, as if she might fall, as if he might
catch her.
“We could go back to Hale’s if you want,” he says later that night, sitting on the edge of her bed before he goes to his own.
“We could live at Ruth’s.”
Annie stares blankly at the wall. “I’ve got class in the morning.”
The week that follows is empty and hard to remember.
Henry stocks up on supplies and returns to Hale’s on a fishing boat heading north. Before his departure, he empties his bank
account. On the dock, he hands a thick stack of bills to Annie, then pulls her into a fierce hug. For an instant, it blocks
out the whole world. “Keep listening to yourself, little fish,” he says.
And then he lets go.