Chapter 51
Before
Aiden can see Mara out on the beach now.
It’s past midnight, nearly four years after she washed up on that bend in the channel.
He stands on the porch outside their cabin. She wanted to live far away from everyone. He gets it: Everyone still gossips
about her like they have nothing better to talk about. No one could accept that she had no story. A washed-up and crazy, amnesic
woman. He’s heard them talk, and he’s at the centre of it now.
He gets on with things and tries to ignore it.
He’s never gotten the full story from Mara and probably never will. Should it bother him more? He has a nebulous sense that
it’s beyond what he’s allowed to know. Maybe she, herself, doesn’t fully know what’s real? And weirdly, he’s okay with it.
For him, she is enough.
Aiden can still boat in to work but it takes him an hour. His shifts pile together while Mara stays here. She reads poetry,
fishes, swims every day. She says she doesn’t want or need to see anyone else.
Tonight, she’s out on the sand, holding her hand up to the darkness. The stars light up her fingertips. No wind touches her.
The moon is full, pulling the tide out.
Aiden taps the splintered wood of the porch railing.
Mara pulls her hair into the nape of her neck and winds it up in a messy bun. She takes off her dress, steps out of her underwear,
and throws them in a heap.
The way Mara explains it, she cannot escape the beach. Doesn’t want to. Not so much the beach, but the water, her need to
submerge. There’s no staying inside the cabin, even when he asks.
“Don’t swim so far out in the middle of the night,” Aiden said earlier, when she woke and left their bed, when he knew where
she was going. He said the same thing every time.
“Mm.” She ran a soft fingertip along his arm.
“Especially pregnant, Mara.”
“Don’t worry.” She kissed his earlobe.
The porch creaks as Aiden leans over the railing, watching her wade out, then dive under. The water parts to welcome her back.
He can no longer see her.
At first, Aiden thought it was strange, how much she needed to be in the water. He understands why she wants to live out of
town, why she recoils around people. He witnessed what happened to her at the hospital, felt the sting of what people said.
Mostly, he’s come to accept her need to swim. He can even sleep through it most nights.
But tonight he’s outside, feeling on the brink of change.
Aiden walks down to the beach after her, thinking about the way they’re living. He hates leaving her every day. Even if he
doesn’t say it out loud, his job is slowly killing him. The monotonous grind in the windowless emergency department, the endless
paperwork.
She is the only thing that makes him feel like himself again.
He’s been thinking about Hale’s Landing. It offers a different kind of life, so remote, so far north. Maybe because she’s
pregnant and they’re starting a family together—-it’s forcing his hand.
“Mara?” He stands on the sand, his voice gliding over the water. “Come to bed!”
She surfaces and floats on her back. Aiden can tell she isn’t finished swimming. “In a bit,” she calls out.
Eventually, he goes back inside.
He sits motionless at the kitchen table for a few minutes. Then, he clicks on the overhead light and pulls out a piece of
paper from the drawer. Dr. Aiden MacLeod writes his short resignation letter to the chief of staff. The next morning, he boats
in, delivers it in a white envelope.
When he exits the hospital, he smells the sea again. A deep agreement in his body. The air on his face; when is the last time
he really felt it? He feels a hundred pounds lighter.
Mara and Aiden use his savings to buy a thirty-four-foot cruising sailboat. They’ll moor it around Hale’s Landing and sell
fish to get by.
They name the boat Amphitrite.
“The ocean goddess,” Mara says.