Chapter 40
On the weekend, Evan departs for another coast guard rescue.
“I’ll only be gone for two days.” He swipes his phone and puts it in his back pocket. “Promise.”
She’s still wearing her pyjamas. When he pulls her against him, the cotton feels flimsy against his stiff uniform. He kisses
her deeply in the doorway—-more hungrily than she was expecting. There’s a pause in it afterward and the lull of something
left unsaid. But Annie leaves it alone, for now. He slings his bag over his shoulder and leaves.
The next day, she stays late at work, installed at the computer in the back hall. As she types, the AI tool keeps suggesting
alternate versions of her sentences, versions she doesn’t want. She can’t figure out how to turn it off, and has to keep backspacing.
Her lab inbox and diagnostic imaging reports accumulate as quickly as she can clear them. She checks her work email for the
tenth time and finds what she found earlier. Nothing important at all.
Walker’s sound arrives again in the same way as before: intermittently. There-and-gone. Confusing.
She must get out of the hospital—-she’s reached the crazy-making point. At the same time, she’s struck by a new idea. As she finishes
up her notes, the idea expands in her mind.
Outside, daylight fades into the winter darkness. The sky is streaked with airplane contrails. As she bikes home through evening traffic, she decides on it.
She hasn’t done it in years.
But it feels like it’s time. It feels like yes.
She stops off at the apartment, changes clothes, and stuffs a sleeping bag into a backpack. Then she’s back on her bike for
another half an hour coasting downhill toward the ocean.
Close to shore, she inhales deeply: the smell of seawater. She climbs over slippery driftwood on an empty beach. Stars pop
in the sky. She unrolls the sleeping bag, takes off her boots, and sinks into it. The sand holds her there, soft and familiar,
almost like it doesn’t mind that she’s been away. As if no time has passed.
She lies still and listens.
Walker’s sound is definitely stronger by the water. She thought it might be. It unfurls in her body like a warm liquid, displacing
everything cold and dark. Her eyelids feel so heavy she cannot stay awake. A swollen moon rises overhead.
A crystalline dream delivers itself. Annie stands alone on Ruth’s porch underneath colourful buoys that still hang from the
rafters. She smells rain. The skies are dark at the horizon and clouds pile up on one another. The sea is restless, the colour
of wolves.
When the rain starts, it spills in waterslides off the roof. She steps into the torrential downpour. It drips from her hair,
off her nose, around her neck. So much water.
She blinks. Walker is there, right in front of her, so close she can touch him.
His T-shirt and jeans are completely soaked. His skin appears thin and gossamer-like, as if she might see through it if she
looks close enough.
His light grey eyes still sparkle like fireflies. She smells the sea on him. He is sweaty and breathing hard. A film of moisture
covers his face.
He takes her hand. His touch is slimy and damp and holds an electric voltage that tunnels into her arm.
“Meet me on the water,” he says.
Annie is devastated to wake.
What time is it? Time seems like a faraway concept.
Everything might be fine if she lies here for eternity, in this place where Walker feels so alive.
But she can’t feel her fingers and toes anymore, and the tip of her nose is icy. She burrows her hands in her pockets. She’s
hungry. When was the last time she had something to eat? She rides home while the moon splinters light through the trees,
between the low-rises, reflecting off the wet concrete. A woman in Roots sweatpants and Blundstones smokes beside the door
of the convenience store under their apartment. She is wearing multiple strands of mala bracelets and a single AirPod in her
left ear. “This is the last time I fucking tell you!” she yells at the phone in her hand. “Can you hear my voice?”
Annie eats leftover lasagna from the fridge. Bowed over the counter, her back aches. She grips her fork without realizing,
then puts it down. A hockey game broadcasts in her neighbour’s apartment: “Those men worked hard on the ice, am I right? That’s
a lot of training paying off right there. That’s hustle!” A door claps shut down the hallway. A threadbare-nothingness feeling
creeps in. She loads her plate into the dishwasher and flips off all the lights.
She empties sand out of her pockets.
When her head hits the pillow, she expects a night of staring at the ceiling, imagining life trajectories with Walker versus
Evan. But unexpectedly, she’s asleep right away, dreamless until morning. It’s already bright outside when she wakes.
In the kitchen, she makes coffee and loads a sticky soap pellet in the dishwasher she forgot to run. Her feet are still cold.
The percolator hisses on the stove.
A key clicks in the lock and the front door opens.
She wasn’t expecting Evan so early. But the clock says 1:05 p.m.; she realizes that she slept half the day.
“Work late?” Evan asks from the doorway. A rush of cool air against her bare legs. He stomps water off his boots, zips off
his jacket, crosses the room toward her.
“I just woke up.”
“Come here.” He pulls her close, picks up her hair and kisses her neck. He murmurs in her ear: “You smell salty.”
“I missed you,” she says. It is true. He smells like cedar, resiny. Like the woods. His cheeks are burnt from the wind. Annie
puts her hands there and he smiles in that way he does, the dimple in his left cheek.
He kisses her.
He needs her right now. She feels it. Maybe she needs him, too? Maybe sex will put her back into the normal pattern of her
life. Wasn’t she fine before the past dragged itself up?
Evan unbuttons her shirt, lifts his own over his head, and pulls off his pants. His hands cup her face, lips are on hers again,
at first soft, then urgent. He slides her underwear down and off. The place she loves between his collarbone and neck is warm
and smooth.
But then the faintest sound of Walker filters into her belly, her pelvis.
For a moment, she’s not in her body. She’s in the far-off deepest places that humans haven’t reached. Those underwater mountains
and valleys. She is only that sound; its inescapable message she can’t seem to decipher.
Evan lifts her up on the counter. Behind her closed eyelids, she sees Walker’s grey eyes, feels the heat of his mouth.
But Evan wraps her legs around his waist and anchors her back here. Her breasts press against him, her face in his neck. She holds Evan harder with the muscles of her thighs so she can stay here with him. Tears run down her cheeks, onto her neck. She bites down on her own forearm.
She touches herself between her legs, so she can come, too. For the shared release of it.
When it’s over for them both, in the quiet, the dishwasher beeps.
Annie wipes her cheeks before Evan can see. He steps back, and she slides off the counter, feet meeting the floor. Buttoning
her shirt in his arms, she lets him draw her close and presses her face to the hot skin of his chest.
He straightens and kisses her gently. “Come in the shower.”
“You taste like outside.” She runs her tongue along her bottom lip.
Evan smiles before walking naked toward the bathroom. The sound of the shower. The percolator sputters its last drops.
Annie doesn’t go into the shower. She makes her breakfast, cold orange slices and yogourt, and tries to focus on the coldness
in her mouth instead of the two things pulling her apart.
The water is still running as she goes to the bedroom. She throws on clean underwear and scrubs and ties back her hair into
its usual braid.
“I have to get to work. I’ll see you tonight,” she says into the bathroom.
Evan is still in the shower, brushing his teeth with an electric toothbrush.
She doesn’t wait for his response. She rides to the hospital and hides out in the back of the emergency department, hunched
over her charting. Only half paying attention to what she types, she lets the scribe do it, lets the algorithm decide, lets
the laptop hum and the machines beep and the floors squeak and the nurses ask questions and the phone on her hip buzz and
the overhead speaker announcements startle her again and again and again.