Chapter 37
apartment. Annie is half an hour late. It’s otherwise empty and that’s why Annie prefers this place, but she’s not here yet.
He calls the ER back line on his cell.
Hazel, the ward clerk, picks up: “She’s in the middle of a chest tube.”
“We had a dinner reservation at five-thirty. Should I cancel?”
“Hold on.” The line clicks over to elevator jazz music.
He puts it on speaker and scrolls Instagram. He finds his favourite feed: a reality TV woodworker on Vancouver Island who
specializes in reclaimed wood and forest conservation. In today’s post, he has a skill saw in one hand and stands over a pile
of barn board. The Pacific horizon fills the background. The caption reads: “2x6s and a lot of sweat! #mytwohands #offgrid
#rainforest #nofilter.”
Hazel isn’t back. A saxophone plays on the line as a server arrives. Wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a pineapple-patterned
shirt, he taps a pencil on his small notebook. “Are you ready to order yet?”
Hazel’s clipped voice: “She’s already done, Evan. She’s coming.”
“Perfect. Thanks.” He hangs up and looks at the server. “We’ll need ten minutes, please.”
Terra Nova is the restaurant they visit most. They don’t play synthetic-feeling music and the tables are far enough apart. The food is pretty decent, and Annie says it’s one of the few places where she can hear herself think.
Evan first brought Annie here during med school. After the violinists at the library, she’d done what she said she’d do: She
got better. She threw herself in headfirst and ended up winning an academic award of excellence about six months afterward.
Earplugs got her through the ceremony; she wore her hair down to hide them.
After the ceremony, they sat at this same table at Terra Nova, side by side on the bench instead of across from each other—-the
way she wanted it—-his thigh pressed up against hers, his voice the closest one to her. A tea light flickered through a golden
glass. She smelled like bergamot and vanilla.
This is where he first kissed her again, after months of working up the nerve.
Annie rolls in while he’s daydreaming about it. That night was nearly four years ago, but it still makes his heart speed up.
She pecks him on the lips, then sits across from him. She’s still wearing her scrubs. Casting plaster smears across her left
sleeve. Her braid is loose and messy.
She’s still distracted. He can tell.
Is she working too much? They’ve hardly seen each other this week.
“I didn’t have a chance to eat today.” She picks up the menu.
He sometimes worries that her work will devour her whole. She has a string of shifts every day this week. They line up like
dominoes on the calendar, tumbling into one another. She works, showers, sleeps. Rinse, repeat.
This isn’t new but it’s worse than usual.
He can’t put his finger on it, but recently there’s a deeper absence about her.
He doesn’t like it at all. Maybe it’s because her life is more complex than it ever was on Amphitrite.
Day in, day out, she’s getting lost in it.
Or is she legitimately missing something, like a vitamin?
“How about a burger?” he says. “You’re a little pale.”
“I haven’t had anything green today.”
“Or mussels. They’re the special.”
“I’m not pale,” she says.
He makes a mental note to suggest she see a doctor, again. She’ll hate that. Doctors never want to see other doctors. But
maybe she needs bloodwork and an objective head-to-toe once-over?
The server is back, pouring ice water. “Have we had enough time with the menus?”
“I’ll have the mussels,” Evan says.
“Arugula and fennel salad, please,” Annie says.
“Make it two salads and two orders of mussels.” Evan hands over the menu.
“I’m not that hungry—-”
“I’ll eat them if you don’t.”
Two women shuffle into the next table. One is wearing a trench coat and dangling feather earrings. Her voice is throaty and
commanding: “Then he had the gall to tell me the whole house has shifted on the foundation,” she says.
“Jesus,” the other woman says. Her faux-fur vest brushes up against Annie’s arm as she sits down.
“They’ll have to repair the entire thing, down to the studs.”
“Do you want to move tables?” Evan whispers. “No big deal.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m fine.” Annie jiggles her knee.
“I told Domenic about that crack over the front door,” Faux-fur says.
“You know how close we are to the cliff!” says Dangly-earring. “God knows. The structural engineer said the frame isn’t even
tied to the foundation.”
“That doesn’t meet code.”
“Just floating there!”
“The house could fall. It’s just a matter of time.”
Evan tries to get Annie’s attention. “Johann is coming over tomorrow to fix our sink.”
“Can you tell him the shower’s dripping?” Annie says. “And the toilet is still running. He said he’d come last week.”
“He’ll come. I’m keeping the faith.” From across the table, he takes her hands into his.
“We’re living at Domenic’s parents for now,” Dangly-earring says. “My mother-in-law is batshit crazy. So fucking neurotic.
But we’re getting new heated floors out of the deal.”
“How was work?” Evan tries again. Annie will usually talk about work.
“I fucking love heated floors,” Faux-fur says.
“Drinks?” The server pours water for both women. The ice clinks against the glass.
“Do you have those grapefruit margaritas?” Dangly asks. “The ones from the summer. I’m addicted.”
“Coming right up.”
Faux-fur says: “I’ll have a gin and tonic.” She pets her vest like an animal.
Annie puts both hands over her ears and closes her eyes. “Yeah. Let’s move to the other side of the restaurant, maybe?” A
strand of hair falls over her face.
“We can go home.”
She opens her eyes. “It’ll be quieter on the other side.”
He tucks the strand behind her ear. “How about we get this to go?”
At home, they eat the mussels and salads from compostable take-out containers at the kitchen counter.
Evan loads his fork with arugula and a ribbon of fennel bulb while Annie stares blankly at the refrigerator, an uneaten mussel
on her fork, the empty shell in her other hand.
He points with his fork toward the mussel. “You gonna eat that?”
She blinks and turns to him. “Apparently not.”
“What are you thinking about?”
She does not tell him. “I don’t mean to be so scattered.”
Evan can’t help but come out with it: “Was it the wrong thing to take you up north again?”
“No.” She drops her fork into the container and closes the lid. “Of course not.”
Evan’s not convinced. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“It’s just . . .” She slouches against the backrest of her stool. “We both go to work and come home and do it all again and
again and again, you know?”
“I agree. We should work less.”
She pauses. “We decided on this. We did it on purpose.”
“But?”
She leans forward again, puts her elbows on the counter and rubs her face. He waits. It takes her a few beats before she speaks
again: “Being up there . . . it messed with my hearing or something.”
“Like the barometric pressure?”
“No.”
“Helicopters can do that,” he ventures.
She shakes her head. He’s clearly not getting it. “It made me remember so many things.”
“Well . . . Port Alice feels like Hale’s.”
She massages her forehead. “I’m thinking about everything again.”
He debates asking her to clarify what everything is. Whether it means all the people she’s lost: Aiden and Mara and Ruth. Or something else?
“I want to forget it,” she says, “and just be us.”
“It would be impossible to forget everything.”
“It would be so much easier to never think about it all again.”
He’s still not sure what it means, but her grey-blue eyes are searching his face. He would prefer to never think about it again either—-the secrets he’s keeping. A line from a Robert Frost poem floats to mind, one he always misquotes, but it’s
something like: the only way out is through. He has to tell her the truth, doesn’t he? Get everything out on the table, all the things they cannot forget. If he told
her, she might leave him. Would she be better or worse off without him? It might destroy her . . . then what’s the point of
telling her?
Annie’s still looking at him. “I just want to forget everything for tonight,” she says.
He has to offer her something. “How about you shower. And I’ll make us a fort? Like we used to.”
She smiles, the first legitimate smile he’s seen from her today.
While Annie showers, Evan pulls the couch cushions onto the floor and covers them with a fleece blanket. He lines up kitchen
stools for a makeshift wall, then stretches a sheet from the couch to the stools, weighing it down with heavy books. With
walls and a roof in place, he adds pillows and their duvet to create a cozy nest inside.
She’s turned off the shower.
He grabs an extra comforter from the hallway closet while Annie towels herself off en route to the bedroom. Since moving to
Vancouver, she’s always cold—-especially her feet and her hands—-so much so that he bought her a heated blanket that he often
plugs in before they go to sleep.
He doesn’t want to deal with the extension cord, so he takes the extra comforter and puts it over the cushions on the floor,
then lays the bed duvet over top of everything. They’ll be sandwiched this way.
She arrives, on hands and knees, crawling through the entrance of the fort, wearing only his last remaining Hale Timber T-shirt. She loves to wear his clothes and does so often; says it makes her feel like they’re together even when they’re apart. He lifts the blankets for her and she dives under.
She whispers. “Take off your clothes, please.”
He slips off his jeans, hoodie, and undershirt, and is down to his boxers in seconds.
Back when they made forts on Amphitrite, they were too young to know they’d need to get very good at building hiding places. An escape for her, mostly; places where
time moves differently and all the sounds are dampened.
They used to read Choose Your Own Adventure books in those forts. Once they moved here, Evan made up the adventure stories himself. Once upon a time, a boy built an
elaborate sandcastle with moats and turrets for a girl who called herself the Octopus Queen. Once upon a time, that girl taught
the boy he could climb to the top of the highest trees and speak with the forest gods. He told her make-believe stories while
he kissed her earlobes and wrapped his arms around her, while she slid her feet between his and kissed him slowly.
“Noses,” she says. Which means: Lie on the cushions facing each other, close enough for their noses to touch. To breathe each
other’s air.
He pulls the blankets up to their chins to cocoon them. She runs her hands up his ribs, to his cheeks, and she kisses him,
her lips so soft, and he wants to devour her—-except that, in here, she gets to decide how it goes. That’s the unspoken rule.
He tells the stories, and she decides the rest.
Sometimes they make a fort and she wants to eat popcorn with sprinkles, wants to recount the conversation she overheard in the elevator: about six-metre-long manta rays that collect in herds—like bubbly manta cocktail parties—in the middle of the ocean.
Or she wants to listen to his stream of consciousness, and he ends up talking about his mom and what it might be like if she was still alive and the scent of her rosemary shampoo or the way she made him brush his teeth even at lunchtime.
Annie listens intently to him, as if she’s trying to hear something else underneath the words.
She does not want to talk tonight.
Her mouth is on his already, her leg up over his hip. She runs her fingertips over his abdomen, pushing down the waistband
of his boxers. Tonight is for bodies talking, and before he can remove her T-shirt, she has rolled over, pressing her backside
into him, already insisting.
She melts against him as he enters her gently. With a low moan, she reaches behind and pulls him deeper inside.
The sound of their synchronized breathing, as he rocks into her again and again, a cascade of pleasure building from his hips
and surging through his body.
This is usually the moment he begins to hear her.
But it’s not a sound that he hears with his ears. It seems to come up from within her, an underneath tone. It’s so quiet and
rhythmic—-watery even—-he must be imagining it. Is it the sound of his own blood rushing?
When they are still and her breath has calmed, he retucks them under the blankets and she finally sleeps. He whispers: “I
love you no matter what.”
He hopes she’ll take him with her, into the water sound, into her dreams.