Chapter 43
Forty years before
Aiden MacLeod takes his fishing boat out before dawn.
He is eighteen years old. This is his favourite hour, mist in the air, alone with the tide pools. He starts the engine and
shoves off the jetty.
It’s the end of August. Hale’s Landing lies five kilometres to his east. The storefronts and cedar-shingled houses are visible
in the faint light from the wharf.
This town has been Aiden’s centre of gravity since he was born, but this morning is different. Everything is set in motion.
He packed a black suitcase last night and hauled it out from his bedroom to the front hall. It waits there to be loaded in
the back of Ruth’s beat-up Honda.
Today, he’ll board the ferry. Its engines will leave a foamy wake behind as it chugs out to the Pacific. He’ll watch his hometown
fade, its potholed grid of roads, tall cedars, and swooping eagles, until he can’t see it past the rocky elbows of the channel.
He tries to imagine the new life ahead of him: the university auditoriums filled with students, their pencils and pens scratching in notebooks.
Ruth has been leaning on him. Medicine would be a good choice, she says.
Practical. Ruth loves the mending of flesh, pulling fish hooks out of palms and tetanus booster shots.
He wants to make her proud.
But out here, he doesn’t have to answer to anyone, except himself and the sea. The water stretches before him into what feels
like infinity.
He pours a cup of coffee from his thermos and perches himself at the helm. Opening his ledger to the correct page, he makes
a quick note of the date, the weather, and his coordinates. A colony of sleeping cormorants roosts in the scrubby pines on
his starboard side, nests of sticks and seaweed. He drives on. The running lights pool in the flat water ahead until he’s
well down the channel. When he slows, waves fall away from the engine.
Hale’s Landing is now only specks of light in the distance.
Aiden roots around in the drawer under the helm. His Uncle Henry’s cigars, a few receipts from selling catch at Rosie’s. Pencil
stubs with shavings, a bungee cord, dusty charts of coastal British Columbia. Then he finds his harmonica in a suede case,
wedged at the back. He slides it out. It’s heavy and cool in his palm.
Over the bow he plays. The notes carry across the water like dragonflies, ripples of sound like the skitter of wings. Nothing
but him, the waves on the hull, the song in the dark.
Is it possible, so young, to know exactly where you belong? At the same time, he has to do what’s expected of him. Doesn’t
he? For a while, at least.
But Aiden has always been one-degree different.
He stops playing and reaches his hand down. He waits, in the dark, fingertips in the water. If he’s patient enough, he knows,
she’ll come.
He’s done this so many times, over so many summers. Ever since he could drive a boat on his own, he was out here at this same
spot, waiting.
An almost imperceptible wave builds off the stern.
These secret visits have left Aiden with an unspoken belief: The sea is awake. She knows a vastness he will never touch. Centuries of life lie beneath him, around him. The sea governs with an undergirding sort of power. Even if he’s a grain of sand in the scheme of things, he feels like he’s seen.
A rustling crosses the water’s surface, until finally, a long, grey back emerges from the inky water beside Aiden’s boat.
Then, a plume of air. He has memorized the exact shape of her breathing, like a signature.
He’s never told a soul about this. Words would cause the power to leak out of these early morning communions.
Aiden places the harmonica next to him on the bench, then rests his palm on her skin. Another puff of breath, a canopy of
vapour. A roll, then an enormous black eye peers into the centre of him.
Soon he’ll be in the arms of the city, far from the ocean. He wonders if she knows. A moan in the water, a click. She still
sings. Minutes pass until the whale dives back under.
Aiden pulls up his hand, the sheen of water, his palm empty.
The sun starts to rise into a lilac sky, an egg yolk on the flat horizon. Underneath the surface of the water, something anchors
him. But it’s fleeting. As he motors back toward Hale’s Landing and the waiting ferry, Aiden can’t quite hold on to it.