Chapter 45
“Your phone keeps buzzing,” Annie says.
They’re finally in the car on the way home from the hospital. Rain mixed with snow pelts the windshield like the sky can’t
decide what it wants to do. The wipers push the slush away.
“Can you check it?” Evan asks. His cell phone lights up in the drink holder. Somehow, she can feel the buzzing through her
seat.
Her thumb skimming the screen, it buzzes again, penetrating the bones of her arm. “Peter’s asking where you are. Harrison
the same.”
Evan pauses.
“I forgot. They’re meeting up for drinks.”
Annie puts the phone back. “Drop me home and you go.”
“Maybe we go together?”
“I’m exhausted. It’ll be noisy.” Annie wants to crawl into bed and feel the relief of sleep. She zips her jacket as high as
it goes.
“We haven’t seen each other.” He reaches over to squeeze her thigh. His left palm steers them through a slew of brake lights.
“I miss you. I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
His phone rings, a synthetic cricket chirp.
“Tell them I’ll call back in a minute.”
Annie picks up. “Hello?”
“Evan? It’s Hollingsworth.”
Annie pulls the phone from her ear and puts it on speaker. “Evan, are you there?” Ed Hollingsworth’s voice fills the car.
“From Hale’s?” Annie asks.
Evan’s knuckles whiten around the steering wheel. “Ed. I’ll call you back.” He reaches over, takes the phone, and presses
the red button to hang up.
Annie’s mouth hangs open. “What was that?”
Evan goes quiet. He wipes dust from the dashboard, the top of the steering wheel. He takes a drink from his mug in the cupholder.
Annie stares at him. “Evan, answer me.”
“Let’s just get home, okay?”
“Why is Ed Hollingsworth calling you?”
“Please just wait,” he says. “We need to sit down.”
After they park, she follows him up the back stairs to the apartment. Evan unlocks the front door and holds it open until
she enters. He sheds his jacket, tosses the car keys in a bowl on the shelf.
Annie waits.
He rakes his hands through his hair and holds the back of his neck. “My dad died.” He says it fast, as if he’s trying to expel
it from his body.
“Evan.” She’s unsure of the correct thing to say. If there is one. “I’m sorry.”
“A month ago.”
“A month?”
“I didn’t find out for at least ten days.”
She puts her hands on her head. “You went weeks without telling me?”
“I was panicked.” A long pause. Then: “He left me Hale Timber, Annie.”
Annie blinks and sees ancient trees on flatbeds. “He what?”
“He stipulated that I had to run it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me!” She can’t mask her anger. How could he hide this from her?
He swallows hard. “I didn’t know how to explain what I felt about it.”
“You could have at least tried.”
“I’ve barely seen you!”
“We’ve been short-staffed. What am I supposed to do? Abandon them?”
He sags onto his forearms over the kitchen island. Silence. Then he stands back up. “Where’ve you been going after work?”
She doesn’t know what to say.
“I know you haven’t been coming straight home.”
She bends down to take off her sneakers. The knots are too tight and they hurt her fingertips. She takes off her damp socks,
walks to the bathroom and throws them across the hall into the bedroom hamper.
Evan follows her.
“You need to talk to Ed,” she says, bracing herself against the sink. “You can’t run Hale Timber.”
“What if I’m supposed to?”
“You hated it.”
“What if I can do it differently?”
“All it ever did was take you away from me.” She hugs her arms around herself and looks up at him. “And it turned you into
someone we didn’t recognize.”
“Annie, I’ve called the emergency department and they’ve told me you’ve gone home. But then you’re not here. You’re hiding
something, too!”
She looks down at the sink.
“Is there someone else?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “It’s not like that.”
“Explain it, then! I’m done tiptoeing around.”
“Tiptoeing?”
“Worrying I’ll send you into a spiral if I ask too many questions! All I want is to help you feel like yourself. I’ve tried so fucking hard, Annie. For so fucking long.”
“I’m sorry.” She really is sorry. She’s trying not to cry.
His voice lowers. “Just tell me what it is.”
It all hangs there between them. Evan waits. Annie realizes that she will not—-cannot—-lie to him any longer.
“I think Walker is still alive.” It comes out unprefaced.
“Walker?”
“When we were up at that rescue in Port Alice—-”
“You saw him?” His voice rises.
Annie is sweating. She turns the water on cold and lets it run over her hands.
“He’s dead, Annie.”
Her heart seizes. “There was this sound I could always hear when he was around. I didn’t know if it was him . . . he said
it wasn’t him. But it was something I could always hear when he was nearby. Only when he was nearby.”
Evan drums his fingers on the doorframe.
“It started again up there.” She pauses, unsure she wants to go on. “I can still hear it, Evan.”
“Right now?”
She nods. “But it’s louder by the water.”
“Christ.”
“I know it sounds strange—-”
“It sounds impossible.”
“I shouldn’t have told you.” Annie escapes through the pocket door to the bedroom.
Following her, he says: “Don’t run away from this.”
“You just said it’s impossible. What else am I going to say?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
She turns to face him. “I’ve been going to the beach to listen for him.”
“For Walker?” he asks, even though it’s clear he knows the answer.
“Yes.”
Evan backs up and slides down the wall to sit on the floor. “He’s been gone for years.” He bows his head, then looks up at
her. “I watched him die with my own eyes. I could never tell you all of it—-it was too brutal.”
“You told me you blacked out. That you didn’t know what happened.”
“I went over,” he says. “It was me.” He balls up his fists. “My life jacket didn’t inflate. He dove in after, pulled me up. But
when I got on deck . . .” Evan pushes himself up off the floor in one forceful move. “For a moment . . . I saw him. His shirt.
Below the surface.”
Evan’s words feel far away. Annie listens for the sound, the one that reattaches her and makes her feel like she’s not going
to float away.
“He saved me, but he couldn’t get back on board . . . And then we hit the rocks. He didn’t come back up. I tried to find him.
I tried so hard.”
“Is there any chance he survived?”
“He wasn’t wearing a life jacket,” Evan says, as if the matter is settled.
Annie does not understand why she believes, even now, that Walker is alive and that for some reason he’s trying to reach her.
“Maybe he’s the one who should have lived,” Evan says. “I’ve thought that—-”
“Stop.”
He grabs the front of his shirt. “It’s my fault we ended up here.”
“Don’t.” Annie puts her hand up. “We’ve made a good life here.”
“Maybe if we went back home, we could start again?”
Time passes. A lifetime, or a few more seconds. The next thing she knows, he is beside her, pulling her against him, whispering into her ear. “I want us to be okay.”
She wants them to be okay, too.
“I love you,” he says. “No matter what.”
“I’ve always loved you.”
“Come here.” He pulls her down on the bed, face to face, noses touching, tracing the lines of her cheeks, over her eyebrows
and around her ears. It’s slow and deliberate. Her sweater is over her head, his shirt is off. Pants and underwear, too. All
of it. His hands follow a familiar route along her ribcage and the backs of her thighs. Their bodies talking this way: skin
on skin, chest to chest, hips against hips, trying to find their way back.
Afterward, his hand cups her ear the way she likes, giving her quiet.
The sweet escape of sleep.
When Annie rouses again, it’s late. Or early. The grey space of predawn. How much time has passed? She sits up and swings
her bare feet to the floor. Evan reaches over, draws her back toward him and whispers: “Stay here.”
She wants to stay.
But Walker’s sound comes through the ground like a siren. She hugs herself and compresses it into her lungs, her blood, as
if it could tell her what to do next.