Chapter 34
Annie rolls over to an empty space.
She fans her fingers over the wrinkly sheets, the rounded edge of the mattress. It’s cold on Evan’s side.
Her ears flood with traffic noise.
Their second-floor rental apartment in East Van is too close to the road. They’ve talked about getting their own place—-maybe
a house?—-but they’re still saving up, still debating the merits of neighbourhoods. This bedroom overlooks cracked asphalt
and a convenience store awning. She stands at the window in her socks. Outside: A pickup with a faulty muffler drives by;
a bus hisses its air brakes. Music plays from the window of a black Volkswagen Golf.
Her breath fogs the glass.
The rest of the world moves. Across the street, a woman in platform sneakers walks her Chihuahua. The dog sniffs the weedy
base of a mailbox while she scrolls her phone. A door chime, then a balding man in a crisp suit emerges from the store below.
He pours sugar from a torn paper package into a Styrofoam coffee cup.
The city cracks awake.
Her right bicep hurts and she massages the muscle.
One of yesterday’s patients, a man with a bristly salt-and-pepper beard, was particularly large; when she intubated him, she had to use every ounce of her strength to lift the lever of the old-school laryngoscope.
Even then, she couldn’t find his vocal cords.
His oxygen levels bottomed out. She had to climb onto the stretcher and wedge her right elbow into her thigh to get enough leverage.
She forgot everything in that moment—the chaos around her, the phantom-like sense of Walker—everything except getting that tube in the right place.
Annie flips on the bedroom lights. They’re too bright. Inside the closet, on the middle shelf, is a pile of poorly folded
scrubs. She takes two elastics from a bowl, secures her braid with one, places the extra on her wrist. Then, she steps into
the oversized scrub pants, pulls the drawstring tight, and slides the top over her head.
She listens. A low-level vibration whispers somewhere in her legs, coming up from beneath.
Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe she is losing it, finally, tightening herself around ghosts.
In the bathroom, she pushes a strip of spearmint toothpaste onto her toothbrush and stares at the stained tile grout, wondering
whether some industrial bleach might work, or a more abrasive scrubber. Water rushes through the tap and the pipes clank.
She applies deodorant that smells of coconut, splashes her face with cold water, and pats her skin dry.
A reassuring yellow sticky note awaits her on the kitchen counter. Evan’s loopy scrawl: “Got called in. Didn’t want to wake
you. Love you.” Signed the way he always does, with a lower case e.
The painting across from the kitchen island is off-centre. It was the first item they bought when they moved in together,
four years ago, from a Taiwanese marbling artist on Granville Island. Annie had stood mesmerized while she floated paint onto
a bath of liquid gelatin, then used a series of combs and rakes to manipulate the colours into two magnificent oak trees.
The leaves are olive green with veins of burnt orange. Roots the colour of bloodstone reach for each other beneath the soil.
The trees touch their branches together.
Annie could not leave without buying the painting.
They picked it up from the artist the following week after she’d made an oak frame for it. With a sharpened pencil behind his ear, his drill and screws and drywall anchors in hand, Evan hung it on the biggest wall. He hung it before they had a couch to sit on.
“So we remember where we came from,” he said.
She walks by this painting a dozen times each day, but too often forgets to look at it. When’s the last time she really looked?
She examines the gnarled knot on the trunk of the wider of the two trees, gold flecks staring back at her.
She straightens the frame.
After a few bites of toast, she scrapes the rest into the compost and lets a strong coffee steam through the percolator. Her
appetite is off. Motionless, she stands at the kitchen island, alternating between listening and trying not to listen. Thinking
and trying not to think. Water fizzles on the burner and the coffee is ready. She pours it into a metal travel thermos.
“Do you think about going home?” Evan had asked her two weeks ago while, side by side on the couch, she typed her name into
the coast guard registry. It was his idea for Annie to sign up. With her newly minted independent licence, she could go anywhere.
“But this is home.” Annie balanced his laptop on her knees, the backlit keys making their click-click-click as a flickering cursor blinked across the screen. “Did you remember to pay the hydro?”
“What about sailing?” he said. “You mentioned a sailboat last month. You’ve been going to the seawall to run. There are things
to go back to.”
Annie stopped typing and thought about what going back to Hale’s would mean. Isaac was still there, and he blamed Annie exclusively
for Evan’s refusal to take over the timber business. He said he suspected Evan was losing his mind right alongside Annie.
Evan and Isaac have not spoken since.
Henry lived off his gillnetter in the channel but didn’t have a cell phone. Annie talked to him occasionally, when he called from the landline at Rosie’s. He sent Annie monthly letters on graph paper, in his block-letter print. He addressed his last letter to Little Fish on the front envelope.
Absence is what she’d find in Hale’s, more than anything. Her parents were not there, not Ruth. Not Walker. Her catalogue
of missing people. She hadn’t yet sailed again, but she could do it here in the harbour if she wanted.
“They don’t have orchestras in Hale’s. Or flat whites,” Annie said.
“I’ve always wanted to buy an espresso machine.”
Annie smiled and resumed typing. “Anyway. Last month I forgot to pay it, and the hydro company sent a warning.”
She’s late for work now. On the small bench by the front door, Annie double ties her laces. All her muscles jump in synchrony
as a neighbour down the hall slams a door. Is everything louder today? She groans as she pulls her jacket off the wooden hook
and swings her lanyard and badge over her neck.
Outside, it’s overcast. The sky is mineral grey.
She unlocks her bike and swipes raindrops off the seat. As she rides by, the newspaper vendor on the corner is drinking his
usual Diet Coke, while the edges of the bundled morning papers flutter in the wind. It smells of wet pavement. A cell phone
pings as she rides past a teenager at the bus stop. She flinches at the tiny detonation.
Pulling over, Annie retrieves her AirPods from the inside pocket of her jacket. Once they’re in her ears, she presses the
sensor on the stem by her right earlobe until she hears the sweet chime of cancelling noise.
At Christmas three years ago, Evan finally bought Annie a cell phone.
It was wrapped in reindeer-covered paper with a silver bow.
The ribbon had a stranglehold on the box, and Annie needed scissors to get underneath it.
Inside, booklets of instructions and an apple-shaped sticker.
The shiny set of AirPods were in a separate box.
Evan took the phone from her hands and pressed the on button.
It lit up with a HELLO! on a white background.
Her eyes watered when she looked at the screen for too long.
Evan set up the SIM card.
“You can get email on here, too,” he said. “This way I can reach you whenever.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” She had held out so long without a phone.
“So we can be connected, is what I was thinking.”
“We are connected.”
His fingers danced over the screen. Over the coming minutes, the pings did not stop: a relentless barrage of notifications
and emails. Evan opened each of the apps to show her what they were. “Maybe you won’t hate it,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“You can even watch TV on it.” He picked out a show with competing vocalists traipsing across a spotlit stage. Judges sat
in front of a clapping audience. Squealing voices nattered, yelled, sang.
She couldn’t keep up with them all.
When she stashed the phone in a drawer in the back of the closet the next day, Annie couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.
She left it there until the battery died. When she told him why, Evan did not try to sway her. He kissed her on the forehead
and said: “We tried.”
She kept the AirPods though, shocked by the bliss of noise cancellation.
She’s getting close to work now, passing a garbage can near the north parking tower. It overflows with hospital wristbands,
crushed pop cans, napkins. Condiments from a take-out bag splatter across the metal rim.
She locks her bike and reluctantly takes out her AirPods.
The silicone earplugs she replaces them with are not nearly as good.
A pop song emerges from the speakers above the hospital entrance, piano music floats out from the gift shop.
The different melodies climb over one another, worse than usual.
Layers of clouds threaten rain. It’s damp and chilly.
Annie holds her breath and walks inside.