Chapter 32
Six years after
Annie stands at the edge of the sea.
She waits for news on an early, mid-January afternoon. The water is restless, pushing and pulling against the rocks with its
ragged breath. The landing pad lights buzz against the stormy sky. Damp wind permeates everything: her jacket, her crumpled
green scrubs.
It’s been too long.
“This is some weather,” says the flight paramedic waiting beside her. His vest radio cackles with empty static. Is his name
Chris? She can’t remember. ARMSTRONG is printed on his reflective vest. “You don’t have to stand out here, Dr. MacLeod.”
“Can you turn down the squelch?” she asks.
Armstrong adjusts the radio knob, but the static does not ease. Still, Annie wants to stand out here; ever since she saw the
ocean from the helicopter earlier, it’s been hard to tear herself away. The sea is dark and thick. It sprays against her face,
catches in her eyelashes.
The radio beeps. “This is Coast Guard Six-Five-Seven-Niner. Get MacLeod on the line.”
Armstrong passes her the handset. “It’s Annie, over.”
“One GCS 3, we’re bagging him. One compound fracture. It’s a femur and probably needs blood. Pressure 80/60. Two others with hypothermia. Ten minutes out, over.”
She hands the radio back to Armstrong and jogs through the sliding doors of the nursing station, into the fluorescent lights
and smell of sanitizer. She pulls off her rain gear and runs a hand over the taut braid of her hair.
Annie circles the resuscitation room methodically: clicks on the warmer and the ventilator, types in settings while tuning
out the shrill beeps of the machines. She pulls medications out of vials into plastic syringes while watching the clock. Ten
minutes out. She needs blood from the freezer in the back lab.
Armstrong is suddenly next to her, priming an IV bag.
“Can you prime a second line? Do you know how to use a level one infuser?” She hauls it out of the equipment chest.
“Think I was born yesterday?” Armstrong replies.
“I’m going to get blood.”
The lab is down a narrow hallway at the back of the station. The door is locked, four numbers written in faded pencil on the
doorframe beside the keypad. She crosses her fingers and clicks the numbers in sequence. A flash of green light and it opens.
She closes the door behind her.
And stops.
A different tone. It’s hushed and barely even there. It vanishes, then returns a few seconds later. She stands still and listens.
It must be the fans, or the ventilation system.
But it’s more familiar than that.
Annie kneels on the floor next to the freezer. She tries to open it with the key she found hanging from an orange thumbtack
on the bulletin board. The lock jams, grinds, will not yield. She tries to force it at a different angle.
The sound persists.
The key finally turns. She retrieves the icy O-negative blood bag in its thick plastic packaging. Using the stubby pencil hanging from a long white string, she records the blood on the inventory clipboard.
Trying to ignore the sound, she fixes her thoughts on sedation protocols, dosing parameters. A rate for the Levophed drip
and whether she saw a kit for a central line somewhere. She wipes her hands on her pants. The sound gets much stronger as
she closes up the lab.
She takes a pair of earplugs out of her back pocket and shoves them into her ears, presses them as far as they’ll go, waiting
for her left brain to kick in, to spit out a logical explanation.
Maybe she’s too close to the water. Too far from home.
She was home, in Vancouver—-only hours ago—-and it was quieter. She and Evan had woken early, when it was still dark, and
spent a long period saying nothing, lying in bed the way they do: bodies entwined. She’d heard of some couples that sleep
separately, on opposite sides of a king bed, or even in different rooms.
This is not how they sleep. It is not how they’ve ever slept.
Even as kids on the deck of Amphitrite, they’d wake up with some body part attached—-hands holding, arms interlocked, legs tangled. Their backs up against one another.
Even when her mom and dad put them to bed in different places on the boat, Annie would sleepwalk to him.
Does she actually sleep when she’s not touching Evan? Certainly it is harder; she usually takes an extra dose of melatonin
or half a zopiclone if he’s on shift or away for coast guard work. She cannot have the covers separating them. She loves the
smell of his armpits and listening to his steady heart.
She doesn’t feel steady now. This sound is growing to the size of a fist inside her low belly. Was it a mistake to come up
here, so much closer to Hale’s Landing?
They’d decided to come together. Around 7:30 a.m., Evan’s cell rang.
A sinking freighter, west of Port Alice.
They were in the middle of coffee: his black, hers with a lot of half-and-half.
He said it was time to go. They drove through gridlocked traffic to the coast guard station and held hands after strapping into their helicopter seat belts.
As they flew north, Annie looked out the window at the twisty strands of water hugging the shore, those sandy deltas of brackish current.
It was the first time she’d deliberately looked at it since leaving Hale’s. Was this the same ocean as before?
“You don’t have to look,” Evan said, and she heard him, even though she was wearing earplugs underneath the helicopter headphones.
Strangely, staring at the water was exactly what she needed to do. She didn’t cry when she saw it. Her heart rate did not
skyrocket.
But here with this sound in the nursing station hallway, her pulse races up into her neck, with this penetrating hum she had
tried so hard to forget.
Annie crouches near the floor in a ball. Her vision narrows: Silt collects where the floor meets the wall; a black scuff marks
the linoleum. The sour smell of her own sweat. She closes her eyes again.
How is this happening? The sound slingshots her back to that slice of summer when Walker was with her. Inside her. The indescribable
vibration of him; moving up through her chest, pouring down her arms and through her fingertips.
The helicopter arrives with its thundering roar overhead.
She opens her eyes. Water dots the floor. She’s been crying without realizing it. The blood bag is freezing in her palm. The
rotors thunk loudly through the ceiling. There is no space in her world for this. Not now. She stands shakily and wipes the
tears away with her shoes.
Annie pushes her fingertips into her scalp so hard it hurts and manages to walk with some autopilot ability of her legs. She
drops the blood on a table in the resuscitation room, then heads back to the tarmac as the helicopter touches down. A blast
of air hits her face.
Evan opens the door.
Before the rotors have stopped, he jumps out to unload the first stretcher. Rain beads on his bright red coast guard jacket.
His curls are compressed by the padded edge of his helmet. The second stretcher follows the first, as he gives her updated
vital signs in rapid succession. His voice carries into the wind.
Close to her now. His steady hand on her shoulder brings her back to earth. She needs him to keep holding on.
“All yours,” he says.
Hours later, the well-practised and nearly mechanical movements of her hands have carried her through splinting bones, setting
lines, attaching telemetry wires, and strapping ventilators. A conveyor belt of work. Walker’s sound has paced underneath
all of it. Persistent. The sky clears up. Night comes with the pink set of the sun and the helicopter ride to Vancouver.
She sits alongside the more unstable of the two patients, tracking the rise and fall of his respirations, his heart rate,
and end-tidal CO2 readings. She writes it all down in the damp medical records on her lap.
“When did you get so good at this?” Evan asks her through the headset.
Annie tucks in a stray blanket corner on the gurney. “It’s all algorithms.”
“It’s more than that,” he goes on. “Those killer hours in residency gave you superpowers.”
She thinks of the drawn-out midnight stretches. The thirty-hour on-call shifts. They were a gift, absorbing her so fully that
all the memories of what happened were corralled behind closed doors.
“I wish I could talk to my dad about it,” Annie says.
“I bet he was amazing at this.”
They slip back into silence.
The patients make it back to Vancouver alive.
Somewhere between the work, the helicopter ride, and the drive back to their apartment, the sound fades. By the time she and
Evan arrive home, only a trace of it remains.
Annie strips off her clothes into a messy pile and gets straight into the shower. Her legs quake and refuse to hold her up.
She gets out of the shower and vomits into the toilet, then sits on the cold tiles with her head between her legs until she
can stand again.
Then she gets back in the shower.
“You alright?” Evan’s voice carries through the closed bathroom door.
She wants to say: I heard Walker up there.
But that would involve explaining everything she’s never explained. It’s late.
“I’m fine,” she says. She lets the water pour over her, watching it escape down the drain, through holes leading to darkness
beneath. She turns the temperature as hot as it will go.
Afterward, at the bathroom counter, Annie avoids her reflection. She can only catch faint echoes of Walker’s sound. She must
have been making it all up. It can’t be real.
“Hey, Annie?” It’s Evan again on the other side of the locked door. “Come to bed.”
She wants to understand how and why this impossible thing is happening to her.
“In a sec,” she responds.
She stays stuck in the bathroom for so much longer that he gives up and goes to bed without her. When she finally opens the
door, the apartment is dark, except for the light on the range hood. The wood flooring creaks as she tiptoes into the bedroom.
Evan is already asleep—-on his front, one arm over his head, the other wrapped under the pillow.
She crawls into the soft flannel sheets and curves into his side, plugging into him like an electrical outlet.
He wakes and pulls her tightly into his chest. Settling her face against his neck, in that place between his collarbone and jaw that belongs to her, she smells sleep in him and tries to forget.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asks into her hair, half awake.
In the soft collapse of his body, the slow rhythm of his breathing, she knows he’s already back to sleep before she says anything
in return.